Team lead routing

Assign a Task to a Team with an Agent lead when you want the lead to decide how the work should be handled. The lead recommends a decision, explains its reasoning, and sends it to your Inbox when approval is required.

Give the Team responsibility

Choose the Team as the Task's Implementer instead of naming a member. The Task enters the Team's queue. A proposed Task joins that queue only after you approve the proposal.

Team assignment does not start every member or make the lead the implementer. The lead normally coordinates the work, though it can take the implementer role when the Team has no other active Agent member.

A routing recommendation settles the Implementer, Planner, and Reviewer together, using explicit choices or the configured defaults. See Assignments and dependencies for how those roles differ.

Review the recommendation

When approval is required, open Review triage in Inbox. You can inspect the lead's rationale, the proposed Task details, and each role assignment without leaving the decision.

In this demonstration, Strategy recommends Scout to plan the checklist changes, Atlas to implement them, and Alex Rivera to review them.

The Task remains owned by the Team while the review waits. The proposed member has not received the assignment yet.

Choose how the work should proceed

The lead can recommend more than a new owner. Review the consequence of the selected Triage decision:

Decision	What happens when applied
Route	Applies the final Task details and assigns the work directly to the selected member.
Defer	Keeps Team ownership until the future Reconsider at time, when the Task becomes eligible for another check.
Block	Pauses progress with an actionable reason. See Blocked work.
Cancel	Ends work that should not continue.
Duplicate	Links the selected Tasks that already represent the work and cancels this Task.

Before recommending a decision, the lead checks for plausible duplicates. Related work and regressions can still deserve their own Tasks. A Duplicate decision should identify the same underlying work, not merely a similar topic.

Apply, adjust, or reject the decision

You can change the recommendation inside Inbox before applying it:

1. Read the rationale and check the proposed Task details and owners.
2. Keep the selected decision or choose another. For Defer, provide a future reconsideration time. For Duplicate, select the Tasks that already represent the work.
3. Edit any Task details or assignments that need changing, then choose Apply decision to save your final choices and resolve the item.

Choose Reject decision when the lead should reconsider, and explain why. Rejection leaves the Task unchanged and returns it to the lead's queue. Closing the modal does not apply the recommendation.

If the Task changes after the recommendation, applying the old review will not overwrite the newer Task. Check the current work before deciding what should happen next.

Set the approval boundary

The effective delegation settings determine whether a routing recommendation waits for Human approval. When approval is not required, the decision applies automatically and is recorded. See Autonomy for the settings and their scope.

Applying a route makes the Task a direct assignment. It still follows the selected member's normal behavior and any planning, approval, dependency, access, budget, and execution-capacity requirements. Routing approval does not approve the Work Spec or the finished result.

An eligible Human can also claim Team work directly. That is separate from an Agent lead's routing recommendation.

When the lead checks work

Agent leads collect Team-owned Task activity for ten minutes before checking the queue. Their configured heartbeat interval also provides a backstop after at least a day without a check-in.

The lead works through the queue by priority and age, considering blocked work, how busy members are, and the active Goals.

Pending routing reviews and deferrals that are not yet due stay out of later checks, so a waiting decision does not produce repeated requests.

Task Machine does not start another heartbeat while one is active. A failed check-in waits for an explicit retry. The lead can also use a check-in to propose new goal-linked Tasks or a dedicated Project.

Use Teams and leads to set up the group and its responsibility. Continue with Agents to configure the members who will plan, implement, and review the work.