Run your team through Hamster

You manage a team and need visibility into the work, clear allocation, and a way to connect strategy to action. This guide takes you from an existing company Goal to an Initiative, a Hamster-drafted Brief, and an assigned Plan your team is bought into.

Who this doc is for

You're a team lead or manager who needs to turn company direction into clear, allocated work. Start from the Goal your team contributes to, shape the Initiative that will move it, then refine the Briefs Hamster drafts with the people who will deliver them.

Pre-flight checklist

Before you start:

• Invite your team — ideally three or more people, so the Brief gets real review.
• Identify the existing company Goal your team is responsible for moving.
• Bring the customer context, constraints, and dependencies Hamster should use to shape the Initiative and its Briefs.

Your first session

A concrete path from company direction to assigned work, start to finish in one sitting:

1. Open the company Goal and create the Initiative your team will own. Hamster helps shape its outcome, boundaries, and relationship to the Goal.
2. Let Hamster draft a Brief for the Initiative.
3. Invite your team to refine the Brief. Engineers, designers, and partners steer scope, surface dependencies, and align on what to deliver.
4. Review the Initiative with your manager or PM. You're ready to plan when they agree on direction and the team agrees on the first Brief.

Post-creation next steps

Once the Initiative and first Brief exist:

1. Decide whether the first Brief is ready to plan or needs design exploration or further discovery.
2. If it's ready, generate a Plan. Hamster drafts the tasks; the team checks the critical path, blockers, and dependencies.
3. Map each task to a team member, or hand the Plan to a Cloud Agent for delivery.
4. Begin the first action from the Plan.
5. Set a review cadence at the Initiative level, and use the Brief and Plan for delivery decisions.

Hamster is the harness and automatically applies relevant Methods throughout this flow. Methods are optional components you can customize when the team needs Hamster to follow a shared convention.

Feature depth

Go deeper on the artifacts a lead leans on most:

• Goals — showing how your team's projects ladder up to company outcomes.
• Initiatives — the team-owned middle layer between a company Goal and its related Briefs.
• Briefs — refining Hamster-drafted work with clear scope and dependencies.
• Plans — reviewing and assigning the tasks Hamster generates from a Brief.
• Methods — optional components for customizing how Hamster shapes and delivers work.
• 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.

Sample first session

1. Minutes 0–10: choose the company Goal and shape your team's Initiative.
2. Minutes 10–30: review the Brief Hamster drafts with the team and align on scope.
3. Same morning: confirm Initiative direction with the PM or your manager.
4. Same morning: with the Brief aligned, generate its Plan. It can take a few minutes, as it really breaks the work down. Then assign tasks.
5. Same day: deliver the first action and review Initiative-level blockers.

Common pitfalls

"Should I create a Brief as soon as a project arrives?" Start by connecting the work to the company Goal and shaping the Initiative. Hamster can then draft the Brief, which moves directly into a Plan once aligned.

"Should I plan before or after the team reviews the Brief?" Refine the Hamster-drafted Brief with the team first, then generate the Plan once it is aligned.