Creating a Team in Span
Last updated: October 27, 2026
Teams group people in Span for reporting, metrics, and team settings. This guide covers who can create and change teams, and how to do it.
Why it matters
Team pages, team-level metrics, and roll-ups through your org structure all follow the teams you set up. Getting team membership right means each team's numbers reflect the people actually on it.
How it works
Permissions
Who | Create, rename, or delete teams | Add or remove members | Team Settings page (sprints, Slack digest) |
|---|---|---|---|
Owners | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Admins | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Custom permission group | Needs Member Management | Needs Member Management | Needs Manage Team Settings for that team |
Member Management: a global permission to add, edit, and remove all members. It covers creating, editing, and deleting teams and changing who is on them.
Manage Team Settings: a team-level permission that opens a team's Team Settings page, where you set up sprint tracking and the team Slack digest. On its own it doesn't let you rename the team or change its members. Those fields on Team Settings are editable only with Member Management.
Managers: anyone with direct reports in your roster is added to the built-in Managers permission group automatically. Team membership doesn't decide this. Reporting lines do.
Synced teams
If your teams come from Directory Sync or an HR system with team sync, Team Management shows a "Teams synced" banner. You can't add or delete teams in Span, and synced fields such as the name, parent team, and members are read-only. Make those changes in your source.
How to create a team
Go to Settings → Team Management.
Click Add Team.
Enter a Name.
In Belongs to, choose the parent team. This places the team in your org structure so its metrics roll up. A team can't be its own ancestor.
In Users, add the people on the team.
Optionally choose a Team target digest recipient. This person receives the manager and target digest emails for the team. It doesn't change membership, visibility, roles, or permissions.
Save the team.
To change one engineer's teams
Go to Settings → People Management.
Open the row menu for the person and choose Edit.
Update Teams. A person can be on more than one team.
Save.
You can also edit the team on Settings → Team Management and change its Users. Both need Member Management.
After you create or change a team
Team edits take about 30 minutes to show in reports. Span then shows metrics for the team based on its members' activity, such as PR cycle time and other engineering metrics. Team metrics follow current membership, so when someone joins a team, their past work appears in that team's history too. See How Span attributes metrics to teams.
Things to know
Nesting: you can build multi-level hierarchies by choosing a parent in Belongs to.
Observers can't be added to teams: people whose member type is Observer, and terminated people, don't appear in the Users picker. Change the person to Team Member first.
People with no team: active team members who aren't on any team are grouped under "No team". The Data Quality Issues drawer on People Management lists them with an Assign team button.
HR-managed teams: if your teams sync from Workday, BambooHR, or another source, change them there. Span picks up the change in the next sync.
Worked example: Priya moves from Mobile to Platform on March 1. You edit her teams on People Management. About 30 minutes later, Platform's trend charts include all of Priya's past PRs, including those from January and February, and Mobile's charts no longer include them.
Related articles
How Span attributes metrics to teams
People Data & Roster Management
Using Directory Sync for Roster Management
Need help?
Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.