Teams

A team is a named group of people in your workspace: Design, Backend, Support, Growth.

Teams do one job extremely well. They give you one handle for many humans, so you can write @design and reach everyone currently on it — without keeping a mental list that goes stale the moment somebody joins.

What a team is not

Worth clearing up early, because the word means different things in different trackers:

• A team is not a permission boundary. Adding someone to a team grants them nothing. Access comes from their role and project membership.
• A team is not a project. Work does not live in a team.
• A team is not automatic. Membership is explicit — a team is a subset of your workspace, and each person on it is a real, deliberate entry.

That last point is a feature. An auto-populated team is one that nobody trusts and everybody mutes.

What a team carries

Field	Notes
Name	“Design”
Handle	The short slug you type after @
Icon	An emoji or an icon, so it is recognizable in a list
Color	Same reason
Description	What this group is for
Lead	One person who owns it

Create one

Go to Teams in the sidebar — or press G S to jump straight to one — and create it. Name it, pick a lead, add people.

Whoever creates the team is added to it automatically, along with anyone picked during creation. After that, people can be added by a manager or can join themselves.

Mention a team

Type @ and the team’s name in any description, comment, chat message, or wiki page. Everyone on the team is notified individually, so nobody has to have been watching the right channel at the right moment.

This works everywhere the editor works. See Write anything.

Mentionable teams are scoped sensibly: in a project context you are offered the teams that are relevant there, rather than every group in the company.

@everyone exists too, and is the blunter instrument. Reach for a team first.

Good teams, bad teams

The failure mode is teams nobody trusts, which happens two ways.

Too broad. A team called “Engineering” with forty people gets muted within a week, and then a real ping to it is missed. Prefer the group that would actually all act on the message.

Too stale. A team that still lists someone who moved on eight months ago makes every mention slightly wrong. Give each team a lead, and the lead a standing job: keep the list true.

A useful rule — if you would hesitate to interrupt all of these people at once, the team is too big.

Archiving

Teams archive rather than disappear. An archived team stops being mentionable, and the history of what was said to it stays readable.

Next

• Invite your team — getting people into the workspace in the first place.
• Roles and permissions — where access actually comes from.
• Write anything — mentioning a team.