Set up a Team · Lesson 4 of 5
What is an Engagement, and how do Cadence, Authority, and Brief work?
Published September 8, 2026
An Engagement is a Worker's employment on one Team, and it is always the same triple: Cadence, when its work starts here; Authority, what it may do alone here; and Brief, what it knows and covers here. Every Engagement starts at Training, and the same Worker can hold different Authority on different Teams.
What is an Engagement?
A Worker’s employment on one Team. A Worker is a craft, defined once; an Engagement is that craft doing a job here, under this Team’s rules, on this Team’s repositories, for this Team’s accountable person. It is always the same triple: Cadence, Authority, and Brief.
That split is why one Proctor can serve four Teams without four configurations of the same reviewer, and why the record of how it does on your Backend Team says nothing about what it may do on your Frontend Team.
What does Cadence set?
When work starts here. Some Cadences are clock-shaped: Bailey proposes on weekday mornings, Harper files the Brief and posts the standup on the same rhythm. Some are event-shaped: Proctor runs when a pull request opens, Fletcher when a pull request changes, Wright off the queue as approved work lands. And every Worker can be asked to run now, by a person, whatever its Cadence says.
What does Authority cover?
What the Worker may act on alone, here. Authority is set per Engagement and bounded by the craft’s ceiling, so a Worker can be trusted further on one Team than another without being redefined.
The clearest case is Proctor: approving on the web app repository, where the Team’s review norms are settled and the record is long, while only advising on the infrastructure repo, where a human still signs off. Same Worker, different leash, set where the review norms actually live.
Bounding it are the caps: spend per Worker and per day, items in flight, and how many review rounds a change gets. Above all of it sits the floor. Merges, deploys, and anything irreversible stay gated at every rung, so Authority widens what a Worker does on its own, never what it can undo.
What goes in the Brief?
What the Worker knows and covers here: which of its checks are on, which of the Team’s repositories and paths it works, and the Playbook rules scoped to it. Proctor’s checks toggle in the Brief, though the core ones stay on. An Engagement’s scope can narrow the Team’s repositories, never widen them.
Reeve is the Worker that gains the most from a role note: a short statement of what it is critiquing plans as and what it should push back on at your company. Without it, a staff-engineer critique is just opinion.
Where do settings come from?
They inherit: platform defaults, then your workspace, then the Team. You only set what is actually different here, and anything you do set is marked as set here so nobody has to guess whether a value is a deliberate local call or a default nobody touched. Reset it in place and it falls back.
Where does every Engagement start?
At Training, where nothing moves without you. It climbs the Ladder on the track record: proposals accepted unedited, plans approved, pull requests merged, reviews acted on, and the misses too. Promotion is a button a person presses when the record supports it, never a switch a Worker flips for itself.
Engage one Worker on one Team first, watch a week of its output, and promote it when it has earned it. That is the whole management loop.
Common questions
Can the same Worker serve two Teams?
Yes. There is one Proctor across your workspace, engaged separately on each Team it serves. The Engagements are independent: their own Cadence, their own Authority, their own checks, and their own rung on the Ladder, each earned on that Team's record.
Why give Reeve a role note?
Because a critique with no point of view is noise. The role note is the standing instruction that tells Reeve what it is reviewing plans as and what it should push back on at this company, so it stays quiet on routine work and speaks on the consequential changes.
What happens when a cap is reached?
The work stops and asks rather than spending past the line. Caps are set per Worker and per day, alongside limits on items in flight and review rounds, and a Worker that runs into one leaves a record of what it was doing when it stopped.
Can we change an Engagement after we set it?
Any time. A setting you change on the Engagement is marked as set here, so it is obvious what is a local decision and what is inherited, and it can be reset in place to fall back to the Team or workspace default.