Your first board in 10 minutes

This tutorial walks you down one straight path. There are no choices to make and no way to get lost: you will sign in, load Metriq's demo data, read your first cycle-time chart, and read your first forecast. By the end you will have seen the two things that make Metriq different from every estimate-driven board you have used — and you will have done it in about ten minutes.

You will not enter a single estimate, story point, or size along the way. That is not an oversight. Metriq forecasts from how long your work actually takes (measured cycle time) run through a Monte Carlo simulation, so there is nothing to guess up front. This tutorial is the fastest way to see that claim become real on screen.

What you need: a Metriq account and a web browser. Nothing to install.

Step 1 — Sign in

1. Open Metriq in your browser and sign in.
2. The first time you arrive, Metriq sends you to the welcome screen titled Welcome to Metriq, with the subtitle "An opinionated board that produces impeccable flow metrics. Choose how you'd like to get started."

You will see three cards side by side:

• Explore with demo data — "Load a sample dataset of work items so you can instantly see flow metrics, forecasts, and the AI coach in action." (It seeds a few dozen items — most of them already finished — so the charts have real history to draw from.)
• Import your data — bring your own work items from Jira or a CSV.
• Start with an empty board — go straight to a clean four-column board.

Just below the three cards sits one more control — Set a delivery target (SLE) — pre-filled with a sensible default. It is a separate, optional action, not a step you must clear first. You will return to it in Step 3, where it changes what you see. For now, you will use the first card.

Why three cards and not a wizard? Metriq treats "bring nothing" as a first-class choice, not a buried link. You are never forced to import or configure before you can look around.

The delivery-target prompt, up close:

What is an SLE? A Service Level Expectation is your team's answer to "how long should a work item usually take?" — for example, "85% of our items finish within 7 days." It is not a deadline and not an estimate per item. It is a single line drawn across your chart so you can see, at a glance, how much of your work lands inside the expectation. You will draw that line in Step 3.

Step 2 — Load the demo data

1. On the Explore with demo data card, click Load demo.
2. Metriq seeds a sample dataset — a few dozen work items, most already finished — into your team and takes you straight to your board.

That is the whole step — Load demo goes directly to the board (and seeds a starter SLE along with the items). The Set a delivery target (SLE) prompt on the welcome screen is a different button: it saves a target and then opens an empty board, so it is not the path to take when you want the demo data. In Step 3 you'll see the demo's SLE already drawn on the chart, and learn how to change it.

Metriq drops you on your board: four fixed columns — Backlog, Ready, In Progress, Done — already populated with the demo items.

Why exactly four columns, with no way to add more? This is intentional. Metriq's columns are fixed so that "cycle time" means the same thing on every board and your flow metrics stay comparable over time and across teams. The fixed board is the feature — it is what makes the charts in the next steps trustworthy.

Step 3 — Read your first cycle-time chart

The demo dataset already contains finished work, so your charts have real history to draw from immediately.

1. In the top navigation, click Analytics.
2. The page opens with an "At a glance" reading of the period; use the chip row at the top to jump to the Flow group, where the cycle-time view lives. Each dot is one completed work item. Its horizontal position is when it finished; its vertical position is its cycle time — the number of days it took to flow from start to done.

Read it like this:

• Each dot is one item. Hover over any dot to see its cycle time in days. A tight cloud of dots low on the chart means fast, predictable flow; dots drifting upward mean items are taking longer.
• The percentile bands (P50, P85, P95) tell you the spread. P85 means "85% of completed items finished in this many days or fewer." That single number is more honest than an average, because it accounts for the slow tail that averages hide.
• The SLE target line is where the target you read about in Step 1 pays off. The demo data ships with an SLE already set — 85% within 7 days — so the target line is already drawn across the chart: dots below the line met your expectation; dots above it ran long. To change it, click Set SLE in the chart's header, adjust the Target (days) and percentile, and save. You now have an instant, visual read on how predictable your delivery is, with no estimate ever entered. (On an empty board you'd start with no line and set one here yourself — see Set an SLE.)

Take a moment to hover over a few dots. This chart is built entirely from measured history. That is the raw material for the forecast you are about to read.

Step 4 — Read your first forecast

Now for the payoff: turning that measured history into a forward-looking answer, again with no estimation.

1. Still on the Analytics page, scroll to the section titled Forecasts.
2. You will see two Monte Carlo forecasts side by side:
   • Monte Carlo: When will it be done?
   • Monte Carlo: How many by target date?

Read the "When will it be done?" card. It does not give you one date. It gives you a row of confidence levels:

• 50% likely by — the optimistic date.
• 70% likely by
• 85% likely by — the date most teams plan around.
• 95% likely by — the conservative, safe date.

This is the heart of Metriq. Instead of asking your team to estimate how long the remaining work will take, Metriq runs thousands of simulations using your team's actual cycle times — the very dots you just looked at — and reports the range of outcomes with how likely each one is.

Why a range instead of a single date? Because a single date is a guess wearing a confident face. A range with probabilities is the truth: delivery is uncertain, and the honest thing to do is tell you how uncertain. When you commit to the 85% likely by date, you are committing to something your own history says you can actually hit — not to a number someone guessed in a planning meeting.

The second card, "How many by target date?", answers the mirror-image question: "By this date, how many items can we expect to finish?" — read the same way, with 50% / 70% / 85% / 95% likely to complete rows.

You did it

In about ten minutes you have:

• Signed in and loaded a working board from demo data.
• Set a Service Level Expectation and seen it drawn as a target line.
• Read a cycle-time chart built from measured history.
• Read a probabilistic forecast generated from that history — without entering a single estimate.

That is the whole loop Metriq runs on: measure real flow, then forecast from it. Everything else in the product builds on these two screens.

Where to go next

• Swap the demo data for your own from the Import your data option on the welcome screen.
• Read Why Metriq has no estimates in the Explanation section to understand the philosophy behind what you just saw.
• Read Why four fixed columns to understand the board model.
• Try the how-to guides for reading the scatterplot in depth and setting your own SLE.