Areas allow Macroscope to categorize development activity into high level groups that align with how your team thinks about your roadmap and product.
Our customers typically create Areas to represent organizational units, product divisions, or cross-functional areas. See Example Areas below.
Once you share your Area descriptions once, Macroscope will automatically:
- Classify all future commit activity into the appropriate Area (using context from the codebase, linked issue management tickets, and Identity Provider (IdP) metadata.
- Generate executive summaries multiple times per day for each Area.
- Allow you to ask questions specific to an Area.
- Send weekly email digests specific to that Area (helpful if, for example, product and engineering leaders for one specific Area want to get executive summaries delivered to them for just that Area).
FAQ: Does my team need Areas?—> If your engineering team is small (fewer than 20 developers), you likely don’t need Areas. Areas are valuable when they help your team understand your work at a higher level. If that structure isn’t useful for your team—or if defining Areas feels forced—we recommend skipping Areas. Macroscope will treat your whole organization as a single Area, and will still generate executive summaries.
Executive Summaries
To provide a high level view of what’s changing in your codebase, Macroscope generates executive summaries for each Area. These summaries are updated several times a day and are displayed on the Home page of the Macroscope website, as well as sent via weekly email digests.
Example Areas
Here are some examples of how teams set up Areas in Macroscope:
- By org or business unit (e.g. Consumer Team, Revenue Team)
- By product strategy groups (e.g. Code Review, Platform)
Writing Effective Area Descriptions
Because Macroscope relies on your Area descriptions to categorize commits to the most relevant Area, it is important to provide a detailed description for each Area.
In your Area description, we recommend you include:
- Types of work that belongs in this Area
- Specific terminology your team uses
- Business context that differentiates this Area from others
- Team names associated with this Area
- Related systems, services, or products covered by this Area
- … & any other details and context that would help Macroscope understand the purpose and scope of this Area!
You can edit an Area description at any time by navigating to the “Areas” page and directly editing an Area’s description.
Example of a Detailed Area Description
Area Name: Consumer Growth
Description:
**Overview of Consumer Growth Area:**
The Consumer Growth team drives user acquisition, and activation for our consumer-facing products.
This team focuses on converting new users into active customers and optimizing the first-time user experience.
---
**Work in this Area:**
- User onboarding flows and tutorials
- Sign-up and authentication experiences
- Marketing landing pages and conversion funnels
- A/B testing frameworks for growth experiments
- Email and push notification campaigns for new users
- Referral and invite systems
- Analytics instrumentation for tracking conversion metrics
---
**Teams:**
- Growth Engineering Team
- Consumer Acquisition Team
- Onboarding Experience Team
---
**Related Systems & Products:**
- Consumer web application (onboarding flows)
- Mobile app sign-up screens
- Marketing website and landing pages
- Email service and notification system
- Experimentation platform
- Analytics and tracking infrastructure
- Referral and rewards service
---
**Typical Projects:**
- Redesigning the sign-up flow to reduce friction
- Implementing a new user tutorial system
- Building invite-a-friend features
- Dreating A/B testing infrastructure for landing pages
- Developing email drip campaigns for inactive users
- Instrumenting conversion funnel analytics
