From the field · platform engineering

Why 80% of PRs from your platform team never merge

We talked to 100+ teams running upgrades, migrations, and security fixes. This field guide breaks down how platform PRs get created, where they stall, and how teams get them merged.

Read the field guide See a sample initiative

From the product team

Your PR's in our backlog, but we're heads-down on sprint work. Come back in a week.
Senior product engineer, fintech with 200+ repos

From the platform team

  1. 1 They open 80 PRs.
  2. 2 The easy ones merge quickly.
  3. 3 The rest land in product teams' backlogs.
  4. 4 Some need weird repo-specific fixes.
  5. 5 Others have no clear owner.
  6. 6 Leadership asks, "Are we done yet?"

The dashboard says "80 PRs opened." Reality says the initiative barely started.

Example initiative

Upgrade 200 services to a new secure base Docker image

An initiative is one engineering change that has to land across many repos, owners, CI setups, and review queues. The hard part is not updating the first Dockerfile. It is getting every service reviewed, fixed, and merged.

  1. 1 Find affected services using the old image
  2. 2 Generate the right change for each service
  3. 3 Review diffs before PRs open
  4. 4 Open PRs in bulk and assign to the right owners
  5. 5 Track merged / blocked / stale / not started
  6. 6 Drive the long tail to completion

The work is not done when PRs open. It is done when the last repo merges.

› Other initiatives that look like this
  • Migrate GitHub Actions workflows across 200 repos
  • Upgrade Python, Ruby, Go, or Node versions where code and CI changes are required
  • Roll out a new observability or logging library
  • Fix a security issue that requires repo-specific remediation
  • Standardize Dockerfiles, Terraform modules, or deployment config
  • Move from one internal library or API to another

What Tidra does

From proposed changes to merged PRs

Six steps. You stay in control at every one.

initiative  
tidra ai agents
0repos
Describe the change You write the initiative in one line.
  1. 1

    Define the initiative

    Describe the change you need across your repos: dependency upgrade, framework migration, CI/CD rollout, security remediation, or config standardization.

  2. 2

    Generate repo-specific diffs

    Tidra analyzes the affected repos and proposes changes tailored to each codebase.

  3. 3

    Review before anything opens

    Your team reviews and refines the proposed changes before PRs are created.

  4. 4

    Open PRs in bulk

    Once approved, Tidra opens PRs across the affected repos.

  5. 5

    Track every repo to completion

    See what is merged, blocked, stale, not started, or waiting on review.

  6. 6

    Move the long tail

    Instead of chasing status across Slack, spreadsheets, and GitHub tabs, use one initiative view to drive the work to merge.

Humans review and approve every PR. Tidra helps generate, organize, and track the work. Your team stays in control of what gets opened and merged.

Have a migration stuck in the long tail?

See how Tidra helps platform teams turn stalled PRs into completed migrations.

See a sample initiative Read the field guide