Inferred investment

Last updated: November 4, 2026

Inferred investment shows where your engineering effort goes, split into New Features, Maintenance, and Developer Experience. Span sorts the work for you with AI, so you get an allocation view without tagging tickets or writing rules. It's for engineering leaders, managers, and finance partners who need to report on how effort is spent.

Why it matters

Most allocation reports depend on clean ticket hygiene or on whose name is on a ticket. Inferred investment reads the work itself, so you get a consistent split across every team, even ones with messy or missing tickets.

  • For engineering leaders: a defensible features vs. maintenance vs. developer experience split to share with your exec team or board, and a way to spot maintenance growing before it eats the roadmap.

  • For engineering managers: a view of what your team actually spent its time on, down to individual PRs and issues.

  • For finance and admins: the same effort numbers that feed cost capitalization, so allocation and finance reports agree.

How it works

Inferred investment works in three steps: Span measures effort, classifies each work item, then adds up the effort by category.

1. Span measures effort in FTE-days. One FTE-day is one person's full working day. Each day a person has activity, such as commits, PR merges, code reviews, or issue status changes, Span splits that day across the issues and PRs they touched. A PR linked to an issue counts toward that issue. An item a person only reviewed counts half as much as an item they worked on. For the full calculation, including review-only days, calendar weighting, and time zones, see See where engineering effort goes, and steer it toward your priorities.

2. AI classifies each PR and issue. Span's AI reads each PR once it is merged, reverted, or closed. It looks at the repository, title, description, code changes, and any linked issue, epic, and project. It reads each issue's title, description, type, and its epic and project. It tags each item with traits, each with a strength of high, medium, low, or very low. Fixed rules then turn those traits into one of three categories. Only high and medium traits count.

  • Maintenance: Bug Fix, Performance, Stability, Dependencies, Security, Infrastructure, Operations, or Customer Support. A stronger Functionality changes, Specs / Research / PoC, or Dev Environment trait overrides this.

  • Developer Experience: Refactor, Code style, CI/CD Pipeline, Monitoring, Dev Environment, Documentation, or Testing Investment. A stronger UI/UX, Functionality changes, or Specs / Research / PoC trait overrides this.

  • New Features: everything else.

Span checks Maintenance first, then Developer Experience.

3. Span adds it up. Each FTE-day takes the category of the item it was spent on. The reports show the share of FTE-days in each category over time, and the average headcount (FTE) behind each slice.

Where to find it: Go to Insights → Allocation → Inferred investment → Overview. The Overview shows the split over time, broken down by team or person. The New Features, Maintenance, and Developer Experience pages break each category into its traits, with issue and PR lists you can open to see the work behind each number. You need permission to view investment reports. By default, people see their own teams and managers see every team.

Setup

Inferred investment is on by default for every organization. You need a connected Git host, such as GitHub or GitLab. Bitbucket Cloud is available on request: ask your Span account team to turn it on. Connecting Jira or Linear adds issue activity and issue context.

To change these settings, you need the Manage Investment permission.

Turn the report on or off

  1. Go to Settings → Investment.

  2. In the Choose Your Investment Views card, switch Inferred Investment on or off, then select Save Changes.

  3. Optional: under Default Investment View, choose which investment report opens first, then save. When it worked, the Inferred investment pages appear under Insights → Allocation for everyone who can view investment reports.

Choose how FTEs are calculated

In Settings → Investment, the Choose How to Calculate FTEs card has two switches. Both change the numbers in every investment report, so decide them before you share results.

  • Include PR reviews in FTE calculations is on by default. Turn it off to count only direct work on issues and PRs. Review-only items then count for nothing.

  • Weight FTE days by calendar availability is off by default, and appears only when a calendar is connected. Turn it on to scale each person-day down by time booked in meetings or marked out of office, so a person-day can add up to less than 1.0.

Reassign a work item. If the AI puts a PR or issue in the wrong category, you can correct it. You need the Manage Investment permission. By default, Owners, Admins, and Finance Admins have it. To give it to managers, add it to a permission group.

  1. Go to Insights → Allocation → Inferred investment and open the list of issues or PRs.

  2. On the item's row, select the "…" menu, then Reassign.

  3. In New Category, pick the trait that fits. Traits are grouped under Maintenance, Productivity (Developer Experience), and Features. Confirm. The item shows under its new trait within 24 hours.

Things to know

  • Categories are fixed: you can't rename, add, or write rules for Inferred investment categories. If you need your own categories, use Labeled investment, which sorts Jira issues by rules you define. The two reports are separate, and you can use either or both.

  • Reassigning fixes one item, not a rule: a reassignment applies to that PR or issue only. It doesn't change how future work is classified. A reassignment on a PR takes precedence over one on its linked issue.

  • Unmatched work counts as New Features: an item with no high or medium Maintenance or Developer Experience trait lands in New Features. This includes items where the AI found only weak signals, so the New Features share can run high.

  • No confidence score: the trait strength (high, medium, low, very low) is the only confidence signal. There is no numeric score.

  • Effort is observed, not hours: Span doesn't track hours, lines of code, or PR counts for effort. A day with no Git or issue activity counts as zero, so meeting-heavy or design days don't show up.

  • Days follow US Pacific time for every organization. For teams in Europe or Asia, late-evening work can land on the next day's date.

  • Common gotcha: if someone without Manage Investment selects Reassign, they see an error. Ask an admin to make the change or grant the permission.

  • Common gotcha: some older help articles and the reassign dialog use "Productivity" for Developer Experience. They are the same category.

Example (default settings)

On Monday, an engineer:

  • works on issue A, a bug fix;

  • works on PR B, a new screen with no linked issue;

  • only reviews PR C, a test cleanup.

Worked items count 1 and the reviewed item counts 0.5, so the day splits 0.4 / 0.4 / 0.2. That day adds 0.4 FTE-days to Maintenance, 0.4 to New Features and 0.2 to Developer Experience.

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Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.