Today’s digital products require cross-functional teams that include product managers, designers, and developers combining their unique strengths to achieve common objectives. As organizations grow, so does the complexity involved in keeping track of who’s working on what, and which objectives you have the capacity to tackle.
This article will show you how to create and work with teams of members.
In this article:
- How teams work
- Creating teams
- Managing teams
- Adding members to a team
- Assigning teams to specific work items
- Visualizing teams
- See also
How teams work
Teams allow you to treat groups of members as a single unit. The members of a team can have different roles (they can even be contributors or viewers!), and you can create as many as you like.
You can assign teams to certain items like features or objectives in the same way that you can assign owners. This makes it easier to create boards that are specific to certain areas of your business by filtering them for certain teams.
You can also @-mention a team to notify of all of its members at once in comments and documents by using their handle, making internal communications much easier.
Teams can be defined around functional areas (marketing, design, leadership), cross-functional product teams, Scrum teams, squads... really any configuration of members you need. And because the same workspace member can belong to multiple teams, you’re free to use many teams for different purposes.
Creating teams
To create a new team:
- From the bottom of the Main menu, click Settings > Teams.
- Click Create team.
- Give your new team a name, description, and avatar, and handle. Click Create when you're done.
- You'll be taken to your new team's membership page. Search workspace members to add them to the team.
- Simply navigate away from this page when you're done. The team's roster is saved whenever you make changes.
Managing teams
To manage a team:
- From the bottom of the Main menu, click Settings > Teams.
- Click directly on a team to return to its membership page. You can change its membership from here.
- Click Edit team to change its name, description, avatar, or handle.
- Click ••• More actions to delete the team. You can also do this from the Team page without having to open an individual team.
Adding members to a team
You can assign a member to a team from the team’s settings (above), from the member’s account info page, or when first inviting a new member into the workspace.
Keep in mind the same member can be added to multiple teams. So a designer could belong to one or more product teams as well as a design functional team.
Note: If you have SAML SSO configured, you’ll still need to assign members to teams from within the application.
Assigning teams to specific work items
Assigning teams to work items will improve capacity planning, clarity, and alignment, and makes it possible to use filters to create team-specific boards You can associate teams with the following item types:
- Objectives
- Key results
- Initiatives
- Features
- Subfeatures
There are two main ways to assign a team to a work item.
From the details sidebar
You can adjust team assignments from the details sidebar of a work item like so:
- Click on the item wherever it appears to open its details sidebar.
- Under Fields, beside Teams, click Not assigned to open the team selector.
- Select a team from the list that appears to assign it to this work item.
Note: We list all teams alphabetically across the product, so if you want to have some teams listed at the top, e.g. your product teams, you can use * as a team prefix.
- (Optional) If you wish to assign multiple teams to this item, open the team selector again. You can then choose as many additional teams to assign as you like.
- (Optional) To unassign a team, just uncheck it from the team selector, or click Unassign all to unassign them all.
From a grid column
You can assign teams to items from a column on any grid board, which tends to be faster than assigning them from details sidebar. To do so:
- On any grid board, click Add columns > Default fields.
- Click the toggle beside Team. The Team column will appear immediately.
- Click the empty circle or team icon in an item's row to change its team assignment.
Note: If you want to assign multiple teams to the same item, you'll need to do so from its details sidebar.
Visualizing teams
Team assignment information can appear in locations other than details sidebars and grid columns, depending on your settings.
As roadmap card attributes
You can visualize team assignments for item cards on columns boards and timelines. You can even click on a team badge to reassign the team for that item.
See Customize your roadmaps with card attributes for details.
As swimlanes
You can group columns boards and timelines by team. See Organize your timelines and columns boards with swimlanes for details.
On reports
Some reports will indicate team information in lists of features.
On filtered boards
Most boards can be filtered to only show items related to specific teams. Creating team-specific boards can help people find their own work without getting lost.
See Advanced filters on New boards for details.