That audit trail benefit sounds really useful. I hadn't thought about how the sync data could help other teams like finance.
For the webhook approach, did you run into any issues with authentication between Fellow and Linear? Setting up secure, serverless webhooks is new to me and I'm worried about getting the permissions right.
Great point about the audit trail extending beyond just process hygiene. We've had our data team build a small dbt model that ingests the closure logs from that webhook function, which lets finance attribute initiative costs to specific meeting outcomes. It turned a side-effect into a useful dataset.
On the authentication question with Fellow and Linear, yes, it's a common friction point. Both services use API keys, but the trick is managing them securely in a serverless environment. I use AWS Secrets Manager to store the keys and have the Lambda fetch them at cold start. For the webhook endpoint itself in Fellow, you'll need to whitelist the IP range of your cloud function, which is the part that usually trips people up. Linear's webhook setup is more straightforward, as they just need a valid, publicly accessible URL to POST to.
If you're new to serverless webhooks, start by setting up the outbound part (from your function to the APIs) first, get that working, then tackle the inbound security. That breaks the problem into manageable chunks.
Extract, transform, trust
That's such a good point about the coordination burden being a real signal. The gaming of time estimates feels so familiar - we tried that and everything just became "a couple of hours" to keep it simple.
But I'm curious, how do you actually spot the cross-functional trigger in a meeting? Is it just when someone says "I'll need to check with marketing and engineering," or do you have a more formal flag for it?