How teams and team membership work in Span

Last updated: October 27, 2026

Span organizes people into a single tree of teams. This article explains how team membership works, how it differs from reporting lines, and how to change it, including after a reorg.

Why it matters

Team pages and team-level metrics are built from team membership. Manager permissions are built from reporting lines. Mixing the two up is the most common reason a person shows up in the wrong place, or a manager can't see the people they expect.

How it works

Teams and reporting lines are separate

Team membership says which teams a person is on. It drives team pages, team metrics, and team settings such as sprint tracking and Slack digests.
Reporting lines come from each person's Manager field. They drive manager-scoped permissions: anyone with direct reports joins the built-in Managers permission group automatically.

Changing someone's manager doesn't move them to a different team, and moving them to a team doesn't change their manager.

The team tree

Every team has a parent, set with Belongs to, up to your organization at the top. Teams roll up through this tree. A person is a member of the specific teams they're assigned to, not of every level above them. For example, a CSV path of Engineering,Backend,Platform creates three teams but makes the person a member of Platform only. Their work still rolls up into Backend and Engineering.

A person can be on more than one team

On a person's profile, Teams takes several values. In a CSV, separate team paths with a pipe: Engineering,Backend | DevOps,Infrastructure. In the Sync API, list the person's email in each team's memberEmails.

Who can be on a team

Only active people whose member type is Team Member can be added to teams. Observers can log in to Span but sit outside team and management hierarchies, and terminated people can't be added either. Active team members who aren't on any team are grouped under "No team".

Team metrics follow current membership

Span attributes work to the person, then rolls it up using today's team membership. When someone changes teams, their full history moves with them. See How Span attributes metrics to teams.

How to change teams and reporting lines

Change one person's teams

Go to Settings → People Management.
Open the row menu for the person and choose Edit.
Update Teams and save.

Or open the team on Settings → Team Management and change its Users. Both need the Member Management permission, which Owners and Admins hold and which you can give to any permission group.

Update reporting lines: three ways

In the app: edit the person on People Management and change Manager. Not available for people whose data comes from a sync.
CSV: set manager_email for each row and run Sync from CSV. The CSV replaces your whole directory.
Directory Sync: change managers in your HR system, or in the reports structure you send to the Sync API. The change arrives as a staged sync to review and apply.

After a reorg

If your teams come from an HR system or the Sync API, make the change in the source. Span stages a sync that lists new, re-parented, restored, and removed teams and memberships. Apply it on Settings → Directory Sync, unless Span has turned on auto-apply for you.
If you manage teams in Span, edit them on Team Management, or upload a CSV and map renamed teams to existing ones so they keep their identity.
Team edits take about 30 minutes to show in reports.

Things to know

Synced teams are read-only in Span: when teams sync from Directory Sync or an HR system, Team Management shows a "Teams synced" banner, and you can't add, delete, or edit synced team fields in Span.
Team Settings is not member management: the Manage Team Settings permission opens a team's Team Settings page for sprint tracking and Slack digests. Renaming the team or changing its members still needs Member Management.
One team structure: Span has a single team tree. There are no separate virtual teams. If you need a cross-team group, such as a working group drawn from several teams, you can create it as its own team and add those people to it as well as to their home teams.
In a CSV export but can't be added to a team: the directory export includes terminated people, and terminated people can't be added to a team. Observers aren't in the export, and they can't be added to a team until you change them to Team Member.
Worked example: Platform (6 people) and Mobile (4 people) both belong to Engineering. Ana is on Platform. You add her to a new Payments working group that also belongs to Engineering. Ana's PRs now appear in both Platform's and Payments' metrics. About 30 minutes after the change, Payments' trend charts include her past PRs too, because team metrics follow current membership.

Creating a Team in Span

How Span attributes metrics to teams

CSV Import of People + Team Data

Using Directory Sync for Roster Management

Roles & Permissions in Span

Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.