Building a custom team

Most teams should start from the catalog. Build from scratch when the work is unusual enough that no template is close — or when you want a team shaped around agents you've already customized.

The builder is the same surface you'd use to edit a team you installed. Once you've worked through it once, you'll know where every setting lives.

Two ways in

From the Teams page, click Create Team. The dialog gives you two paths:

Build from scratch — opens a tiny dialog for the team name, then drops you into an empty builder.
Start with a template — opens the catalog inside the dialog; clicking a template instantiates it (a copy of the team and a new agent definition for each member that isn't already in your workspace).

Most builds should start from a template — see The team catalog. From-scratch is the right path when the work is genuinely outside what the catalog covers.

The builder layout

A team's detail page has two tabs — Chat and Settings. While you're building, you're on Settings: identity at the top, roster manager and team canvas below.

The canvas is a mind-map view of the roster, with the lead marked at the centre. Adding or removing members updates the canvas live, so you can see the team's shape as you build it.

Identity

Three fields at the top:

Name. Required, up to 100 characters.
Description. Optional. Shown on the team card and in your roster.
Business area. Required dropdown — Marketing, Legal, Strategy, Accounting, Sales, Engineering, HR, Operations, or Custom. Used to group teams on the Teams page.

Choosing the lead and roster

The roster manager lists the agents in your workspace — both custom ones and any installed from the agent catalog. Search by name, job title, or description, then click an agent to add them to the team.

The first agent you add becomes the lead by default. The lead carries a Lead badge and sits at the centre of the canvas. To reassign, find the member you want to lead and click Make lead next to their name — the badge moves over and the canvas re-centres. There's only ever one lead per team.

The same agent can be on multiple teams

Agent definitions live in your workspace as single records — teams reference them through a join. Adding the same agent to a second team doesn't duplicate the agent; it just links the existing definition to the new team.

That makes utility agents like a daily-briefer or an inbox triager easy to share across packs without redoing their instructions each time.

Suggested prompts

In the team's Settings you can add a handful of starter prompts that show as chips below the message box on a fresh conversation. Worth filling in for teams you'll come back to often — saves typing.

Saving and running the team

The team saves when you've got at least a name, a business area, and one member. One thing to know before you save and walk away: a team needs both a lead and at least one non-lead member to actually run — the builder will let you save a one-member team, but trying to run it fails until you add a second agent.

So in practice: add at least two agents before you save, with one of them marked as the lead. Then the team will be runnable from chat, from a task assignment, or on a schedule.

Iterating after launch

Expect one or two roster adjustments in the first week. Signals to act on:

The lead is doing all the work and never handing off — the team is probably too narrow, or a single agent would do.
The lead is handing off constantly to the same one specialist — fold that specialist's responsibilities into the lead, or accept that this is a two-agent team.
The result reads patched-together — the roster might be too broad. Drop a member or two and see if focus tightens up.

Tips and gotchas

The Lead badge is the visible marker for the team's lead. The first agent added gets it; reassign with Make lead at any time.
Description, suggested prompts, and roster all update live — there's no separate "publish" step. Saving applies your latest changes.
Avatars, names, and job titles come from each agent's settings, not from the team. To rename an agent's role on this team, edit the agent itself.