Day 6: Issue-to-PR ratio

Engagement vs shipping — 1.5+ healthy, 0.7- firefighting.

Yesterday

Yesterday's repo-creation reading told you whether the team is building outward. Today's tells you whether they're keeping up with the inbound at the same time.

Why this signal matters

The team-health signal. A startup with a heavy issue queue and a thin PR queue is collecting feedback they can't ship against. A startup with PRs flowing daily and an issue queue that drains is shipping faster than it accumulates problems.

The 5-minute exercise

1Open the org's most-active repo.
2Click Issues. Note: open count, closed count, ratio.
3Click Pull requests. Same — open, closed, ratio.
4Compute: PRs closed in last 30 days ÷ Issues opened in last 30 days.

What you’re filtering for

A ratio of ~1.5 or higher (more PRs closing than issues opening). Below ~0.7 means feedback is piling up faster than the team can ship.

Edge case

Some teams use a separate issue tracker (Linear, Jira) and only use GitHub Issues for community reports. In that case, the ratio is misleading. Look at PR count alone — 10+ PRs closed in 30 days is healthy, <3 is dormant.

Bonus

A team that ships faster than its inbox can absorb the next round's hire and accelerate further. A team buried in issues needs the round to hire a triage layer first — the round is firefighting, not acceleration. Same headline number, very different bet.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the wrap. I'll show you how to compose all six signals into a single score, and how to run it across 4,200 startup orgs in four seconds.

Curriculum: /challenge · Methodology: /methodology · Paper: ssrn.com/abstract=6606558