Run your team through Hamster

You manage a team and need visibility into the work, clear allocation, and a way to cascade strategy into action. This guide takes you from a project Brief to an assigned Plan your team is bought into.

Who this doc is for

You're a team lead or manager who needs to turn incoming projects into clear, allocated work without losing sight of how it ladders up to company goals. Start by writing a Brief for the project your team is taking on, then refine it with the people who'll deliver it.

Pre-flight checklist

Before you start:

• Invite your team — ideally three or more people, so the Brief gets real review.
• Understand your company's Goals or OKRs, so you can show your team how their work connects.
• Know which Briefs or projects are coming your way, so you scope the right thing first.

Your first week

A concrete path from an incoming project to assigned work:

1. Create the first Brief for the project your team is taking on.
2. Invite your team to review and refine it. You want their input and their buy-in, and they'll spot blockers you can't see.
3. Review with your manager or PM to confirm alignment. You're done when the team agrees on scope and your manager agrees on direction.

Post-creation next steps

Once the Brief exists:

1. Refine scope with your team. Do they see hidden blockers, or disagree on what's in?
2. Decide: is this ready to plan, or does it need design exploration or further discovery first?
3. If it's ready, generate a Plan and map each task to a team member, or hand a well-scoped one to a Cloud Agent that delivers it for you.
4. Identify the critical path, the blockers, and the dependencies before work starts.
5. Set a review cadence — standups, a bi-weekly sync — and use it to track progress and surface blockers early.

Feature depth

Go deeper on the artifacts a lead leans on most:

• Briefs — writing team-scoped Briefs with clear scope and dependencies.
• Plans — building and assigning Plans, and getting task granularity right.
• Goals — showing how your team's projects ladder up to company outcomes.
• Delivering Briefs — shipping an aligned Brief to a GitHub PR and tracking the pull request.
• Cloud Agents — delivering Briefs and Tasks from the cloud so the team can ship in parallel.
• Initiatives — a single status surface for everything in flight under one outcome.

Sample first-week workflow

1. Monday: create the Brief for your team's next project.
2. Monday–Tuesday: invite the team to review; collect feedback.
3. Wednesday: sync with the PM or your manager to confirm alignment.
4. Thursday: generate the Plan; assign tasks.
5. Friday: run the first standup; identify blockers.

Common pitfalls

"Should I plan before or after the team reviews the Brief?" Refine the Brief with the team first, then generate the Plan once it's aligned. Planning a Brief the team disagrees with just plans the disagreement.

"My team is distributed. How do I keep everyone aligned?" Lean on the Plan and async comments, and set a review cadence that works across time zones.