When you open the Timing insights tab, the first thing you’ll see is the Work in Progress chart that shows the tasks that your team is working on right now. The list is sorted so that the items that have been the longest in progress are shown on top.

Hover the cursor over the question mark to see all the steps that a task has taken so far, and how long it stayed in each workflow state:

The cycle time scatter plot shows how long it took to complete a task after the work was started. Each circle corresponds to a completed task. The higher the circle, the longer it took to complete the task. That allows you to visually see the outliers.

Let’s take a closer look at that tooltip:

The task started from the Sprint backlog and progressed from Doing to Done. For each step, the time that the task stayed in that specific state is shown above the timeline, and the date when it arrived in that state is shown below.

Here’s an example of a slightly more complex workflow:

The timeline reveals that the task has visited the same states multiple times since it has bounced from Doing back to Sprint backlog. What could be the reason for that? Perhaps the requirements were unclear, and the developer couldn't proceed with the task.

Having this kind of information available helps you to see the problem areas and to take action proactively.