create-team-charter

Create Team Charter

Produces a team charter as a single artifact. Synthesizes the team's purpose, vision, customers, responsibilities, roles, operating norms, decision-making, and success metrics, so the team and its stakeholders share one clear answer to why the team exists, what it owns, and how it works.

A charter is not a strategy document or a backlog. It is the agreement that makes ownership and boundaries unambiguous. Without one, teams drift into overlapping work, unclear handoffs, and goals no one can prioritize against.

Prerequisites

• A team name provided as $1, or stated in context. If omitted, ask for it before proceeding.
• The parent organization's mission and values, if available, to align with and avoid contradicting them.
• Existing artifacts for this team (a prior charter, an OKR doc, an org chart), if any, to revise rather than replace.
• Adjacent team charters, if any, to keep responsibilities and boundaries non-overlapping.

Steps

1. Resolve the team name and derive the slug (lowercase, hyphenated, no special characters). Determine or ask for the parent org, the team lead or owner, and where team documents live (default teams/<team-slug>/).
2. Write the Purpose: one to two sentences on why this team exists and the problem or need it addresses for the organization. Name the organization-level outcome the team is accountable for, not the activities it performs.
3. Write the Vision: the future state the team is working toward over its current horizon (for example, the next year). Make it specific enough to guide decisions, not a generic aspiration.
4. Identify Customers and stakeholders: who the team serves (internal or external), who depends on its output, and whose goals it must advance. Name concrete groups or teams, not "the company".
5. Define Responsibilities: the outcomes and services the team owns outright, phrased as what it is accountable for. Separate core responsibilities from supporting ones.
6. Define Non-responsibilities: what the team deliberately does not own, with a pointer to the team that does where known. This section reduces boundary disputes and is as important as Responsibilities.
7. Capture Roles and membership: the people on the team and their roles (lead, members, extended or embedded), with a one-line accountability for each. Capture accountabilities, not every task.
8. Define Operating norms: how the team works day to day (cadences such as standup and planning, communication channels, core hours or handoffs, working agreements).
9. Define Decision-making: how decisions are made and escalated (for example, propose and discuss, then the lead decides; escalate unresolved conflicts to a named owner). State who has authority for what, so decisions do not stall.
10. Define Success metrics: how the team knows it is succeeding, framed as outcomes rather than activity. For detailed objectives and key results, link to /create-goals instead of duplicating the OKR detail here.
11. Optional: record Values or guiding principles the team commits to, especially where they differ from or emphasize the org's values. Omit the section if the team simply inherits the org values.
12. Record Open questions: anything unresolved (unclear ownership, a pending reorg, a dependency on another team's decision). A charter that names its open gaps is more useful than one that hides them.
13. Write the output to teams/<team-slug>/charter.md (or the path agreed in step 1) using the Output Format below.
14. Include session_link: http://localhost:10000/?session=<id> in the frontmatter, using the current session ID from context. If no session ID is available, omit the field.