Using the Cross Team toggle in the Review Response Time Report
Last updated: October 27, 2026
The Cross-Team toggle on the Code review pages limits Review Response Time, and the other code review metrics, to reviews where the reviewer and the pull request (PR) author sit on unrelated teams.
Why it matters
Reviews across team boundaries often wait longer than reviews inside a team, and they are easy to miss in an all-reviews average. The toggle shows which teams are slow to respond to other teams' PRs, so you can find the dependencies that slow the broader organization down.
How it works
Review Response Time measures the time from when a reviewer was requested (or, with no request, the latest time the PR became ready for review, or else PR creation) to that reviewer's first review on the PR. Span counts the first review per reviewer only, in hours, for developer contributors only. The Trimmed Average caps each value at 30 days.
What "cross-team" means. With the toggle set to Cross-Team, Span keeps a review only when:
both the reviewer and the PR author map to people in Span, and
neither person's team is an ancestor or descendant of the other's in your team tree.
A reviewer on a parent or child team of the author's team counts as same-team, not cross-team.
The view is one-way. When you group by person with Cross-Team on, the person is the reviewer. You see how quickly that person responded to PRs authored by someone on an unrelated team. You don't see reviews that person received from outside their team.
Grouping by person | Cross-team behavior |
|---|---|
The "person" is the reviewer | Keeps reviews they gave where the PR author was on an unrelated team |
Direction | One-way: the reviewer's team compared with the author's team |
To measure both directions, for example how quickly Alice responds to cross-team PRs and how quickly cross-team reviewers respond to Alice's PRs, analyze each perspective separately.
How to find cross-team review bottlenecks
Go to Insights → Productivity → Quality → Code review.
Set the toggle at the top of the page from All to Cross-Team.
Group by team to segment by the reviewer's team.
Teams with consistently high response times in this view are slow to respond to review requests from outside their own team. This view always reflects the reviewer's team. To see which teams' PRs wait longest for outside review, filter the report to one team's authored PRs and repeat the analysis.
Span saves your toggle choice for your organization in your browser.
Things to know
Worked example: your team tree has Platform with a child team, API, and a separate team, Mobile. A Platform lead reviewing an API engineer's PR is same-team, because Platform is API's parent. A Mobile engineer reviewing an API engineer's PR is cross-team. If the Mobile engineer's response took 30 hours and the Platform lead's took 4 hours, the All view averages both (17 hours) and the Cross-Team view shows only the 30-hour review.
Unknown status drops out: reviews by coding agents set up as dev agents, and reviews by or for people with no team, have no cross-team status, so they leave the metric when the toggle is on.
Current teams: Span uses today's team membership for both people, so a reorg changes past cross-team values.
Review Capacity uses a different rule: the Review Capacity page decides intra-team versus cross-team at the hierarchy level you pick there (Squads by default). The two pages can classify the same review differently.
Other code review metrics: with Cross-Team on, PR Review Cycles keeps only PRs with at least one cross-team review.
Related articles
Review Response Time (Average)
How Span attributes metrics to teams
Need help?
Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.