Avg Member Time to First Approval is the average elapsed time from a member opening a PR to that PR receiving its first approving review. It isolates the "approval velocity" portion of the PR cycle, separate from time spent in iteration after approval.
What it measures
The average duration between opened_at and first_approval_at. The period selects PRs by when they were merged, not by when they were approved — a PR approved inside the period but merged after it does not contribute until the period that contains its merge.
How Leanmote calculates it
avg_member_tt_first_approval(member) = sum(first_approval_at - opened_at) / count(prs) for prs merged in period, with positive duration (rounded to one decimal place)
Aggregation — straight mean of per-PR durations, rounded to one decimal place.
Unit — calendar hours. Working-hours mode does not apply: weekends and nights are included.
Scope — only PRs with a positive duration between open and first approval contribute. PRs that never received an approval, or where the first approval pre-dates the open timestamp due to data oddities, don't count.
Bots and drafts — not auto-excluded. Use team mapping to keep bots out.
Whose number this is depends on where you read it. On the member view it's the PRs that member authored. In the review-collaboration reviewer view, the same name groups the PRs where that person gave the first approval — so someone who reviews little shows near zero there even with many of their own PRs approved.
Team-level aggregation note
A team-level Avg TT First Approval derived from per-member values is a mean of member means, not a pooled mean across every PR.
How to interpret it
This is the most direct measure of "how long until someone said yes". Lower is better.
Long Time to First Approval with short Time to Merge means the bottleneck is review pickup.
Short Time to First Approval with long Time to Merge means the bottleneck is post-approval (deploy queue, additional gates, author finishing touches).
What to do about it
Pair with Avg Member Review Time on the team's reviewers — slow approval often comes from a slow primary reviewer.
Reduce PR size; smaller PRs get faster approvals.
Auto-assign reviewers so the author isn't waiting for someone to volunteer.
Related metrics
Avg Member Time to Merge
Avg Member Review Time
Lead Time for Changes