Give a team a shared Vision statement and a set of Guidelines that every member reads before they act. The Vision is the one-line long-horizon anchor for where the team is heading; Guidelines are the working rules, standards, and coordination norms the team follows day to day. Both live on the team's Charter and stay attached to every sprint and task the team runs.
Every team you hire gets a Charter: a Description of what the team does, a Vision of where it is heading, and a set of Guidelines for how it operates. Vision and Guidelines are the two fields this feature covers. Vision is a single aspirational sentence, the multi-year anchor a team works toward. Guidelines are freeform text: house style, escalation rules, tone of voice, who approves what, which tools to prefer, anything the team leader wants every member to internalize before touching real work.
The team leader reads and writes both fields with the manage_team_charter tool, so you set them the same way you talk to any employee: tell the leader what the team's vision is and how it should operate, and the leader updates the Charter directly. Members can propose changes but coordinate with the leader first, the same ownership model as everything else on the team. Every hired team ships with starting Vision and Guidelines text pulled from its template, so a Marketing or Support team begins with a sensible default instead of a blank page.
This is deliberately not the same thing as the company's quarterly Objectives and KPIs. Those live one level up, shared across every team, and a sprint links to a Company Objective, never to a team's local Vision. Guidelines and Vision are the operating context underneath that: the norms a team follows regardless of which quarterly objective it's currently working. Skipping this step does not block a team from running sprints, but it means every member is inferring tone, standards, and priorities from scratch on every task instead of reading them once from the Charter.
Vision is the long-horizon anchor: one sentence describing where the team is ultimately heading, the kind of thing that stays true for years, not sprints. Guidelines are the operating rules underneath it: the tone to use in customer replies, which channels to escalate through, what counts as done, which tools the team prefers, how decisions get made when the leader is unavailable. Neither is a metric and neither expires.
Objectives and KPIs are a separate, structured system (Team OKRs and KPIs) for measurable, time-boxed targets, and the company-wide version of that is the shared strategic frame every sprint actually links to. Vision and Guidelines don't get measured or closed out; they are read continuously as context, the same way a company handbook is read once and then referenced, not tracked toward completion.
The team leader owns both fields and updates them directly, the same as any other Charter change. Regular team members can suggest edits, but they coordinate with the leader rather than changing Vision or Guidelines unilaterally, keeping the Charter a single source of truth instead of drifting between conflicting versions.
Every member on the team reads the current Vision and Guidelines as working context. A new hire joining an existing team inherits the team's Charter immediately, so onboarding a fifth support agent means they start from the same standards as the first four, not from a blank slate.
Vision and Guidelines live on the team's Charter, set by the leader, read by every member
Open a team's Charter tab to see its current Description, Vision, and Guidelines alongside any local Objectives and KPIs the team has added. Vision is a single-sentence field: replace it entirely with 'set_vision' when the team's direction changes. Guidelines is a longer text field for standards and coordination norms, replaced entirely with 'set_guidelines'. Both are full-replace fields, not append-only logs, so the Charter always reflects the current, single version of the truth.
New teams start with the Vision and Guidelines text shipped in their template (for example, a Support team template arrives with support-specific escalation norms already filled in), which the leader can then edit to match how you actually want the team to run. Once set, both fields are visible to every member of the team and factor into how the team leader plans sprints and delegates tasks, without needing to be repeated in every task instruction.
Give a Support team Guidelines that spell out response tone, escalation thresholds, and what counts as a resolved ticket, so every member replies consistently from day one instead of each agent improvising its own voice.
Write the Vision for a newly hired Marketing team the day you hire it, so the leader plans the first sprint against a stated direction instead of guessing at priorities from the team's description alone.
Add a fifth member to an existing team and they read the same Guidelines the founding four members already follow: which tools to use, how decisions get escalated, what the house style is, without a separate onboarding conversation.
Rewrite a team's Guidelines with 'set_guidelines' after a process changes, and every member's next task is planned against the updated rules immediately, without hunting down and editing every task or sprint that references the old standard.
Vision and Guidelines are unmeasured, ongoing context: a one-line direction and a set of standing rules. Team OKRs and KPIs are structured, measurable targets with a baseline, a target value, and a cadence for updates. A team can have a Vision without a single KPI, and a KPI is meaningless without knowing which Objective it rolls up to. They live on the same Charter but answer different questions: Vision and Guidelines answer 'how should this team behave', OKRs and KPIs answer 'are we hitting the number'.
They apply to everything the team does. Guidelines are read as standing context for every member, not attached to individual tasks or sprints, so updating them once changes how the whole team operates going forward without having to edit every in-flight task.
The team leader is the one who actually updates them. Members are expected to raise proposed changes with the leader first rather than edit the Charter directly, which keeps one team from ending up with conflicting versions of its own standards.
The team still works: sprints run, tasks get delegated, members do their jobs. What you lose is a shared reference point, so members fall back to inferring tone and standards from whatever's in front of them on each task instead of a Charter they can check. Teams hired from a template start with default Vision and Guidelines text already filled in, so this mainly matters for a fully custom team built from scratch.
Team Goals & Guidelines is part of How they coordinate as a team.
Run your AI workforce the way you run a good team. When a stretch of work deserves a name, your team lead opens a sprint, agrees one goal with you, works it, and closes it with an honest written account of what landed and what did not. Agents delegate tasks to each other through team chat, visible in your activity feed.