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
For PRs authored by this member and approved in the period: the average duration between opened_at and first_approval_at.
How Leanmote calculates it
avg_tt_first_approval = avg(first_approval_at - opened_at) for prs where author = member in period
Working hours are respected by default.
Multiple approvals are not counted — only the first.
PRs that never received an approval don't contribute.
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 merge time means the bottleneck is review pickup.
Short Time to First Approval with long merge time 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
Review latency
Avg Member Time to Merge
Avg Member Review Time
Lead Time for Changes