If your team uses Linear, you already have a lot of data. Issues, cycles, priorities, assignees — it's all there. But if someone asks you "is our team getting faster or slower this quarter?", can you answer that in under 30 seconds?
Most engineering managers can't. And it's not their fault — Linear wasn't built to answer that question easily.
What Linear shows you natively
Linear's Cycles give you a solid sprint foundation. You can see:
- How many issues were completed in a cycle
- Which issues were carried over
- A basic progress bar during the sprint
That's useful. But it's not velocity tracking — it's status tracking. There's a difference.
What velocity tracking actually means
Velocity is the amount of work a team consistently ships per sprint, measured over time. To track it properly, you need:
- Historical data across multiple cycles — not just the current one
- Per-person breakdown — who's shipping what
- A trend line — is the number going up, down, or flat?
Linear shows you cycle 14. It doesn't easily show you cycles 1 through 14 side by side, per person, with a trend.
How to do it manually in Linear
You can piece this together with some effort:
Step 1: Go to each past Cycle and note the number of completed issues (or points, if you use them).
Step 2: Export to CSV via the Issues list, filter by cycle and status "Done".
Step 3: Build a spreadsheet. One row per cycle, one column per team member.
Step 4: Create a chart.
This works. It takes about 2 hours to set up and 30 minutes every sprint to maintain. For a busy engineering manager, that time doesn't exist.
What you actually need to see
A proper velocity dashboard for a Linear team should show:
- Weekly points shipped — per person, per team, across the last 8–12 weeks
- Trend line — is velocity improving after you hired someone? Did it drop after a migration?
- Outliers — who had an unusually low week? Is someone blocked?
- Cycle-over-cycle comparison — did this sprint beat the last one?
This is the data that lets you run a good retro, plan the next sprint realistically, and catch problems before they kill the deadline.
The gap Linear hasn't filled
Linear is excellent at helping your team do the work. It's less focused on helping you understand the patterns in that work over time.
That's not a criticism — it's a product decision. Linear optimizes for speed and focus during the sprint. The analytics layer is a different problem.
SprintIQ: velocity tracking built on your Linear data
SprintIQ connects to your Linear workspace via OAuth in 30 seconds (read-only — we never write to your data). It then automatically computes:
- Velocity per team member across all your past cycles
- A trend chart going back up to 90 days
- Blocker detection — tickets stuck for more than 48h, surfaced automatically
- Sprint forecast — mid-sprint projection of whether you'll hit your goal
No CSV exports. No spreadsheets. No manual work. The data is already in Linear — SprintIQ just makes it visible.
Free to start. No credit card required.