Roles
A role is a job: the tasks done in it, the members who hold it, and the tools and caps that come with it.
What a role is
A role is a job, such as Onsite SEO or Product Engineer. It is defined by the tasks done in it, and held by members. A member can hold several roles, and a role can be held by several members.
Roles are how work finds a member. A task is given to a role, never to one person, and whoever holds that role on the task's team and is free does the next run. A role with no team is enterprise-wide: whoever holds it can take its tasks on any team that has no role of its own by that name.
Creating a role
Roles → Create, in the portal:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Name | The job's name. |
| Slug | Its short name, taken from the name if you leave it blank. Unique in the enterprise. |
| Members | Who holds it. You can add holders later. |
You can also give a member a role from their own page, or when you create them and put them on a team.
Tasks on a role
On a role's page, Manage tasks adds a task to the role or takes it off. The page then draws the role's tasks as a workflow, with the handoffs in and out of each.
A task on a role runs for its holders:
- Each run goes to a member who holds the role on the task's team and is free, the one who has waited longest first.
- If every holder is busy, work that arrived by handoff, retry, webhook or chat waits for the first to be free.
- If nobody on the task's team holds the role, the task cannot start. The Map lists it under Outside the team structure, with the reason.
A role and its team
A role belongs to one team, or to none yet. That matters for the tasks on it: a run goes only to a holder of the role on the task's team.
A role created in the portal starts on no team. It joins one when a member who holds it becomes that team's lead: making a member lead moves their team-less roles to the team, along with the tasks they do in them. Over the API, a role can be created on a team directly.
What comes with a role
A role is also a layer that tools and caps attach to:
- Tools. A tool bound to a role reaches the work of every member who holds it, and replaces the same tool bound on the member, their team or the enterprise (tool directory).
- Spend. A cap set on a role applies to the runs of every member who holds it, alongside every other cap that applies (Spend and models).
Planned
Coming for roles
- Changing and deleting a role. Renaming a role, and deleting one nobody needs any more. Today a role's holders and tasks can change, but the role itself cannot be renamed or deleted.
- Public roles to clone. A role with all its tasks, cloned from another company and ready to give to one of your members. See the role directory.