How Frontline keeps engineering work moving

Engineering managers know better than most the friction points of managing projects and team’s work across multiple, disparate tools. Simple tasks often evolve into cumbersome, manual work, consuming precious time and resources. Whether it’s tracking in-progress work, ensuring timely code reviews, or avoiding projects from stalling, the daily effort required to maintain visibility feels like a constant balancing act.

For teams looking to streamline processes without the burden of manual follow-ups, having a central, real-time view into team operations can make for smoother workflows while supporting a natural flow of work. Frontline was built to give engineering managers the visibility they need to keep projects moving while empowering their teams to stay focused.

Solving the challenges of fragmented visibility

Engineering managers are expected to stay in tune with team activity and project health. But when project tracking is scattered, frustration follows. Status updates live in disparate systems like GitHub and Jira, and gathering context becomes time-intensive, often requiring manual follow-ups. These interruptions disrupt both an engineering manager’s day and the team’s workflow, challenging engineering managers to support progress without overstepping into daily tasks. Frontline bridges these gaps, solving the fragmented visibility problem by creating a shared view into team activity that supports, rather than disrupts, workflows.

Alongside dashboards, receive weekly AI-powered recaps that summarize your team’s progress:

Set review standards with customizable SLOs

Timely pull request reviews are critical, yet delays are common. To help teams establish a rhythm of regular feedback, Frontline enables teams to set specific Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for pull request review cycles. The goal of these SLOs is to support, not control, the process, ensuring pull requests progress without requiring constant follow-ups from engineering managers.

SLOs can include customizable rules such as:

• Pull request size – Smaller change sets are easier to review and less prone to introducing complex issues. Setting limits on pull request size helps keep the feedback loop manageable, allowing teams to deliver changes faster.
• Pull request staleness – Stale pull requests can become a bottleneck, leading to context loss and slowing down the workflow. By defining staleness parameters, engineering managers can ensure that tasks stay active, keeping progress steady and preventing forgotten or delayed reviews.
• Review turnaround time – Setting clear expectations for review response times encourages prompt feedback, reducing idle time and improving overall delivery speed. With turnaround goals in place, teams can maintain a rhythm that supports efficiency without sacrificing quality.

Gentle nudges for stalled work

Manual follow-ups can be time-intensive and disruptive, and nobody wants additional emails. Frontline offers customizable nudges that notify team members directly within their usual tools—like Slack or Teams—when a task, such as a pull request or ticket, shows signs of stalling.

These nudges are easily tailored to control how and when reminders are triggered, with the flexibility to customize triggers, frequency, and recipients to best suit team needs. In addition to visibility, Frontline supports two essential dimensions of workflow: when nudges should surface information and where they’re best received. This allows engineering managers to focus on guiding their teams, rather than tracking individual tasks.

Engineering managers can establish default settings for the team, creating a baseline that aligns with project goals. At the same time, Frontline allows individual developers to tailor their settings, so they receive only the notifications and reminders that are relevant to their workflow—minimizing distractions and keeping focus intact.

If you are an existing DX customer and would like to learn more about Frontline, please contact your account representative today. To learn more about DX and our full suite of products, please request a demo through our website.