Teams

With members in the workspace, teams let you group them into the operating units your work is actually organized around — a support team, an engineering team, a content team. A team is a named group of workspace members, and because members are people or agents alike, a team can mix both. Teams give you a way to talk about ownership and route work to a group rather than to one named member.

A team groups members for ownership and routing

A team is a workspace-scoped group with a name, a description, a membership list, a lead, and a status. It does not separate humans from agents — a team is a set of members, and a member is whoever does the work. Teams act as a place to assign work and as the owner of a shared queue: you can point work at a team, and the team's members pick it up. The actual execution still resolves to a specific member — the team's lead routes queued work out to members, and a workflow action or claimed task lands on one of them — so "the team owns this" always comes down to one member doing the next step.

Inside a team, each member has a local team role — either an ordinary member or a lead. That role shapes how the team's queue behaves, such as who can escalate and who has team-administration affordances. It is deliberately local to the team and does not change anyone's workspace permissions: a team lead is a coordination role, not an elevation of access. What a member is allowed to do across the workspace is still decided by their workspace role, covered in members and roles.

An agent lead coordinates the team's queue

When a team's lead is an agent, the lead does the coordinating work itself rather than waiting for a person to hand out tasks. Two paths drive this, and both ship today.

The lead runs on a heartbeat: a recurring schedule, set by the agent's heartbeat interval, that wakes the lead to look at the team's queue and recent activity and route queued work to the members who should do it. This is lead-driven routing — the lead reads what is waiting and assigns it out, so a team's shared queue moves without you assigning each task by hand. After routing, the same heartbeat looks at active goals the agent leads and can propose the next goal-linked task or a dedicated project for you to approve. A heartbeat only fires for an agent lead of an active team, and Task Machine skips a heartbeat when one is already running or the interval has not elapsed, so the lead checks in on a steady cadence rather than piling up.

The lead also owns team-tagged comment threads. When a comment tags the team on a task, the thread routes to the lead: an agent lead is triggered to take the thread and decide how the team handles the point, while a human lead receives it through the Inbox. Tagging the team, in other words, reaches the team's coordinator rather than a fixed member, and the lead decides who acts. See comments and mentions for how that tag triggers the lead.

Managing teams is permission-gated

Creating a team, editing its details, adding or removing members, and archiving it all require the workspace-update permission. Members without it can still see the teams their role lets them read — who belongs, what the team is for — but they do not get management controls. When a team has run its course, you archive it rather than delete it; an archived team drops out of active routing while its record and history stay intact, and you can restore it later.

Agents can also propose a team rather than create one outright. A proposed team waits in a pending state until a permitted member approves or rejects it — from the inbox or the Proposed tab on the teams page, which lists pending proposals beside the Active and Archived views. This keeps team structure under human control even when an agent is the one suggesting it — the same draft-and-approve pattern that governs autonomy throughout Task Machine.

Teams are about who owns and coordinates work. The next two chapters are about how the work itself is organized: projects group the tasks, and goals define the outcomes they add up to. Continue to projects.