How Developers Manage Pull Requests Across Distributed Teams

Pull requests work best when feedback is fast. In distributed teams working across several projects, it is rarely the case.

Engineers working across time zones often wait hours or days for reviews. A PR opened at the end of one workday might not be reviewed until the next day elsewhere. That delay forces context switching and slows development.

Traditional PR workflows compound the issue. Linear reviews and single-branch work push developers to batch changes, resulting in larger PRs that take longer to review and approve.

But pull requests and code review do not have to be difficult for distributed teams. 

How so?

Below, we answer how developers can manage pull requests across distributed teams.

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The Challenges of Managing Pull Requests in Distributed Teams

Here are the most common challenges that even strong teams feel when the pull requests start bouncing across calendars and competing priorities👇

⚠️ Review cycles slow down without shared context

In distributed teams, even small pull requests can take longer because reviewers need more background. You also need to consider that the author may be offline when questions come in. What would have been a two-minute clarification in person can turn into a full-day delay, eating up developer productivity.

⚠️ It is harder to spot risk when changes are too big

Large pull requests are tough to evaluate asynchronously. Without quick live back-and-forth, reviewers may either over-comment to compensate or miss edge cases because the change is simply too dense. You cannot overlook these details during the sprint planning process.

⚠️ Feedback quality drops when the bar is unclear

A consistent code review process in software development depends on shared expectations. If one reviewer is optimizing for speed while another is optimizing for long-term maintainability, the author ends up navigating conflicting feedback. This is when progress takes a backseat. 

⚠️ Async comments can turn into long, unproductive threads

Text-only code review can become inefficient in the software development process for distributed teams. 

Here’s why: If comments arrive hours later and lack the complete context, it turns into a long back-and-forth thread. 

When the reviewers can’t explain why a change is needed, feedback becomes fragmented. Authors respond defensively or guess at intent, leading to follow-up comments, revisions, and more delays. 

Far from speeding up the reviews, async comments slow the development process and stretch PR cycles far beyond what the change actually requires.

💡 Pro Tip: Use threaded comments with a binding ‘resolve’ action to prevent async discussions from sprawling. Set a rule, like if a thread hits 3+ back-and-forth messages, jump on a quick 5-minute ClickUp SyncUp.

Alternatively, with ClickUp Clips, reviewers can record a quick screen walkthrough or voice explanation right inside the task or PR context. This gives authors immediate clarity on suggestions and preserves rich context across time zones without extra live meetings.

⚠️ Dependencies and sequencing become harder to manage

In distributed execution, PRs pile up due to hidden dependencies. When one change is blocked, downstream work piles up, merge conflicts increase, and releases become more fragile.

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Why a Centralized Pull Request Workflow Matters

A centralized pull request workflow, especially in Agile project management, uses a central repo (often with a protected main branch) where developers create feature branches, submit PRs for review, and merge changes only after approval. 

Think of it as an ideal version control system: a single shared place for changes, checks, and approvals. 

The reason it matters so much is because:

1. Quality assurance and bug prevention

QA is all about protecting code quality through a peer review process before changes hit. 

When a developer or software engineer submits a PR in a centralized workflow, it lets team members catch logic errors, security vulnerabilities, or performance bottlenecks that the original author might have missed.

• Early defect detection: Reviewers catch edge cases the author didn’t test (null states, pagination, time zones, retries, permissions)
• Performance sanity checks: Small review prompts like ‘What’s the worst-case input?’ often surface O(n²) loops, heavy queries, or unbounded logging
• Automated safety nets: Most centralized workflows integrate with CI/CD pipelines. CI runs tests, linters, and scans on the PR branch so risky code changes get blocked before they hit main

2. Knowledge sharing and mentorship

A centralized PR workflow is one of the most effective ways to level up a team. And here’s why:

• Onboarding: New hires can read through old PRs to understand the ‘why’ behind specific architectural decisions
• Cross-team awareness: PR summaries, screenshots, and linked docs help people outside the feature area still follow along
• Contextual documentation: The conversation history within a PR serves as a permanent record of why a feature was implemented a certain way, which helps pull requests work as a dynamic knowledge base

3. Consistency and standards

If you don’t have a centralized checkpoint, codebases can become a Wild West of different naming conventions, folder structures, and patterns. To avoid this, you must have in place: 

• Style enforcement: PRs allow the team to enforce a unified style guide
• API consistency: Review catches mismatched response shapes, inconsistent error handling, and accidental breaking changes
• Architectural alignment: It ensures that one developer doesn’t implement a new library or pattern that conflicts with the existing architecture

4. Conflict resolution and stability

In a centralized workflow, the main/master branch is critical for development teams. For this, you should have: 

• Merge conflict management: By requiring PRs, developers and software teams are forced to rebase or merge the latest changes from the main branch into their feature branch. This resolves conflicts locally rather than breaking the build for everyone else
• Rollback-friendly changes: Smaller PRs are easier to revert without collateral damage when something slips through
• Traceability: If a bug is discovered in production, the PR history makes it easy to identify exactly which change introduced the issue and why it was approved

5. Enhanced sprint planning and visibility

A centralized PR workflow acts as a real-time pulse for your sprint.

• Accurate progress tracking: In many teams, a task stays ‘In Progress’ for days, creating a ‘black box’ effect. With a PR-first approach, the moment a PR is opened, stakeholders and project managers have a view of the work’s legitimate status and complexity
• Earlier risk surfacing: Large diffs, failing CI, or repeat review loops expose scope creep while there’s still time to adjust
• Predictable velocity: By enforcing PRs, you get to prevent ‘hidden work.’ Every change is accounted for, allowing the team to measure their actual velocity (how much they can realistically finish and review) vs. just how much they can type

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How Developers Use ClickUp to Manage Pull Requests Seamlessly

LinearB’s engineering benchmarks analyzed 6.1M+ pull requests across 3,000 teams and highlighted that a PR size is the strongest driver of engineering velocity.

It makes sense when you think about it. Smaller PRs tend to get through the review process quickly because they’re simpler to look at. On the other hand, larger PRs take more time to move along, and they often require more coordination among the team.

ClickUp, the world’s first Converged AI Workspace, eliminates that coordination overhead of handling pull requests. How so? 

By keeping PR work tied to the task that represents it, making review status visible, and capturing decisions where the team already collaborates. 

Here’s how you can use ClickUp to manage pull requests:

1. Connect GitHub or GitLab repositories to ClickUp

The first step developers take to manage PRs is to integrate GitHub or GitLab repositories with ClickUp. 

This is particularly handy when multiple Git repositories feed into the same product area, and you still want a single source of truth for status and context.

This native integration automatically syncs commits, branches, and PRs (merge requests in GitLab) to ClickUp Tasks. As a result, this brings real-time development activity right into your project workspace, ending the lifelong battle of context switching.

Start by referencing a ClickUp Task ID in your commit messages, branch names, PR/merge request titles, or descriptions (using formats like #{task_id} or CU-{task_id}). ClickUp instantly links everything:

• Commits, branches, and PRs appear in the task’s right sidebar (via the Git icon) with key details like status, author, reviewers, line changes, and branches
• Activity shows up in the task’s feed for full context

• You can even view open PRs/merge requests across tasks using a dedicated Pull Requests column in ClickUp Views

🎯 In day-to-day use, you have a few other ways to pull code context into the task.

If you paste a GitHub link into a task description or comment, ClickUp adds a GitHub icon in the right sidebar of the task view. You can click that icon anytime to see every GitHub link that’s been posted in the task, so the history stays easy to scan in one place.

At the end of the day, all of this means that developers can see exactly which tasks are tied to which PRs, monitor progress, create new branches or PRs from tasks, and keep everything aligned (minus the manual updates).

2. Automate status updates

Layer ClickUp Automations to your GitHub/GitLab integration to make task statuses update automatically as pull requests (or merge requests) move through the software development lifecycle.

If you are a developer, you can set up rules that trigger on events like:

• A Pull Request is Opened → Change task status to ‘In Review’ or ‘Code Review’
• A Pull Request is Merged → Move the task to ‘Done,’ ‘Deployed,’ or ‘In Production’
• A Pull Request is Closed (without merging) → Set status to ‘Rejected’ or ‘Backlog’

Even better, you can add on-point conditions for task automation, such as:

• Only trigger on PRs targeting the main branch
• Apply only to PRs with specific labels (e.g., ‘hotfix’ or ‘feature’)
• Combine them (for example, merged to the QA branch with an urgent label → set high priority and notify the team)

🚀 ClickUp Advantage: If you don’t want to build an endless list of manual automations, ClickUp has planned for that, too. Use ClickUp’s AI Automation Builder to describe the workflow in plain English, like ‘When a PR is opened, move the linked task to In Review, assign the reviewer, and post a comment with the checklist.’ And boom…you have a setup ready in under five minutes!

3. Augment your team with AI-powered teammates

To raise the bar higher, developers deploy ClickUp Super Agents, ClickUp’s own AI-powered teammates that handle adaptive, multi-step processes with full workspace context. 

These agents learn from interactions, use natural language for chats, and can be triggered manually or on schedules, adding smart, human-like support to your PR flow.

Codegen in ClickUp is your external AI developer teammate designed to help software teams automate and accelerate development tasks, including managing pull requests across multiple teams.

It can complete tasks, build features, and answer code-related questions using natural language. Assign tasks to Codegen or @mention it in comments to make it generate or review code, or prepare production-ready pull requests based on its programmed behavior.

4. Create Pull Request dashboards

If you want PRs to be visible without chasing updates, put them on ClickUp Dashboards.

Start by aligning your workflow. Many teams map PR stages to task statuses (for example, ‘In review,’ ‘Changes requested,’ ‘Approved,’ ‘Merged’). You can even capture PR state with ClickUp Custom Fields if your task status needs to stay product-focused.

From there, build a simple set of cards that answer the questions you check during the day:

• What is currently open vs. in review vs. merged? Add Status cards to show counts by status, then group or filter by the List, Sprint, or team that owns the work
• Where is the review piling up? Add a Pie Chart card to break down work by status or another field you use to represent the PR stage
• Is the queue improving over time? Use time-based dashboard cards to view how those statuses change across a week or a sprint, based on historical task data. This is useful when you want to separate a one-day spike from a pattern

5. Enable async reviews and feedback

A London School of Economics report found that 35% of business meetings are considered unproductive. For PR reviews, the waste might arise from scheduling a walkthrough that could have been shared once and reused.

Enter ClickUp Clips! Record quick screen walkthroughs, drop them into the task or chat thread, and let reviewers respond when they’re ready. 

Clips also support time-stamped comments to tie feedback to the moment in the video. This solves the endless back-and-forth of ‘Where exactly do you need this change?’

And if you are wondering, getting started is just as easy! Start a Clip from the toolbar, from a task comment, or directly from Clips Hub.

After you record, share it with a single click. If you recorded the Clip in a task comment, you can open it and copy the Clip URL from the share icon. 

From Clips Hub, you can copy the link the same way.

💡 Pro Tip: ClickUp Brain can summarize a Clip for you from the Clip view, so you can get a quick recap when you’re short on time. Open the Clip, go to the right panel, click Summarize, then paste the summary into your PR task comment as the review context for everyone else.

Generate summaries with ClickUp Brain

6. Generate on-point summaries with AI

When a task comment thread gets long, use ClickUp Brain to summarize the activity in the task description and comments. It provides a summary you can easily add back to the task. 

The next reviewer can jump right in from where things stand, without having to scroll through everything.

Even beyond, in ClickUp Chat, Brain can summarize a Channel for a specific window, like today, the last 24 hours, or the last seven days. 

That’s the fastest way to pull review feedback out of a busy thread and turn it into a single update you can share with your team.

But that’s not all. Here’s what you also get with ClickUp Brain 👇

• Ask questions with context: Mention @Brain in a comment or Chat message and ask for summaries, decisions, workflows, and even meetings. It responds like a teammate with all the workspace context in store
• Create a task from a specific message: In a Channel or DM, hover over the message that contains the PR decision and click Create Task. Choose the List yourself or let AI pick one with Automatic. The task appears above the message and stays connected for you to open it later or copy the task link back into the PR thread

• Surface summaries at scale: Use AI Fields like a Summary field to generate task summaries in Lists, Folders, or Spaces without opening each task

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Best Practices for Managing Pull Requests Across Time Zones

While pull requests can be managed across time zones, it usually takes a few intentional habits to keep reviews from stalling. Some of the best ones include 👇

• Keep pull requests digestible and reviewable: Break work into single-intent slices, separate refactors from behavior changes, and use feature flags when needed so reviews stay fast even when schedules do not overlap
• Set a humane review cadence: Define an async review SLA (like first response within 24 working hours) and encourage a daily review window per region to make sure code review becomes predictable without expecting instant replies
• Standardize the code review process with templates: Use a consistent PR template for context, scope, testing, risks, and rollout notes
• Route reviews with ownership: Use CODEOWNERS, review groups, and clear labels like ‘needs-review,’ ‘blocked,’ and ‘priority’ to prevent PRs from sitting idle just because the right person is offline
• Batch feedback to reduce back-and-forth: Encourage reviewers to leave grouped comments and clear decision signals (approve with nits, request changes) to guarantee conversations stay decisive
• Let automation do the first pass: Make CI checks, linting, tests, and preview environments required so the human review focuses on logic, edge cases, and design trade-offs
• Identify and address friction: Monitor the time taken for the first review, merging, trends in PR sizes, and rates of reopening. This will help you detect any slowdowns in cross-time-zone collaboration and modify your workflow before it becomes a standard issue

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Common Pitfalls to Avoid in Distributed Code Reviews

Here are the common pitfalls that slow distributed code reviews, even when the team is doing everything else right:

❌ Over-reliance on asynchronous communication: Trying to resolve architectural debates or explain nuanced tradeoffs through comment threads becomes exhausting. Twenty comments deep, you realize a 10-minute call would have sorted everything out, but you stubbornly stay async.

❌ Tool limitations amplifying distributed challenges: Poor code review tools lack threading for conversation history, don’t show timezone-aware timestamps, fail to surface urgent reviews, or make it hard to track what needs attention. This compounds all other distributed team problems.

❌ Inadequate documentation standards: Teams assume ‘the code speaks for itself’ or that they’ll explain things if asked, but distributed teams can’t tap shoulders for clarification. This creates constant bottlenecks where reviewers need explanations, slowing everything down.

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Run Consistent Pull Requests Across Every Time Zone With ClickUp

Pull requests move faster when your team follows a single system for code, context, and decisions, even when you are not online at the same time.

And that’s why many remote teams turn to ClickUp. They use ClickUp Integrations to connect GitHub or GitLab and keep PR activity tied to the right tasks, ClickUp Automations to keep teams updated, and ClickUp Dashboards to track progress.

When a walkthrough is needed, ClickUp Clips support async review, and ClickUp SyncUps enable quick real-time alignment.

The real star, though, is the integrated AI (ClickUp Brain) and AI Agents. These let teams summarize PR discussions, identify and execute next steps, and even generate code.

Try ClickUp for yourself. Sign up now! ✅

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