Teams & mandates

What a team is

A team is a durable coordination unit with a clear mandate, measurable outcome pressure, and authority to organize work inside its scope. Agents, runs, and sessions exist inside or on behalf of teams. Teams are the main planning and operating surface of the company.

An exocorp should be team-first, not agent-first. This is not a cosmetic choice. It’s how the organization avoids dissolving into a list of personalities. Agents are vivid; teams are where responsibility becomes legible.

What a team owns

• A mandate — What the team is responsible for. Defines the scope of work it can accept, the resources it can use, and the outcomes it’s expected to deliver.
• A KPI set / utility vector — How the team’s success is measured. Usually a set rather than a single scalar — primary outcome metrics, guardrail metrics, health metrics.
• A budget scope — What the team is allowed to spend. Budgets are enforced; a team can’t operate outside them. Budget pressure surfaces as alerts: advisory, soft-limit, hard-stop.
• An inbox and outbox — How work enters and leaves the team. Cross-team waits become explicit through these.
• Local policies — Team-scoped rules: spend authorization, approval gates, escalation paths, allowed tools, session-reuse policy.
• Persistent agents — The team’s durable role bindings. Every persistent agent belongs to exactly one team.
• Heartbeats — Narrow, clock-driven obligations the team owns (e.g. a daily review at 09:00). Heartbeats are not generic “wake up and do something” loops — they materialize through activation rules before they emit triggers.
• Local operating memory — Team-scoped doctrine, prior outcome reviews, local skill packages, and accumulated team-specific knowledge. Some of this rolls up into the company knowledgebase; some stays local.
• Optional child teams — Teams can have sub-teams when the mandate needs durable subdivision. The hierarchy is the org chart.

What “mandate” means here

A mandate isn’t a prompt. It’s a brief — a description of what the team owns, what it’s allowed to do, what outcomes it’s accountable for, and where its authority ends. Concrete, durable, auditable.

Mandates can change. Over time, a mandate may get narrowed when scope was too wide, paused when a bet stalled, replaced, demoted, or retired entirely. Mandate changes are real governance events — not just renaming.

Lifecycle

A team moves through these coarse states: proposed, active, paused, retired. Pausing a team stops it from accepting new work; existing in-flight runs may complete depending on policy. Retiring a team is permanent — its mandate, agents, and remaining work need explicit closure or migration.

Familiar and unusual shapes

Some teams in an exocorp will look familiar: marketing, delivery, operations, research, growth. Others may look strange: capability acquisition, lifecycle evaluation, memory stewardship, workflow ecology, promise integrity. The test isn’t whether the team’s name appears in a human org chart. The test is whether the team owns a real operating surface that benefits from durable local optimization.