Team charter
A team charter template that documents a new team's purpose, norms, roles, and decision rights, with a cadence for revisiting it as the team evolves.
About this template
A new team without a shared charter tends to default to whatever norms the loudest person brings from their last job. This template gets purpose, roles, working norms, decision rights, and how the team communicates agreed on explicitly, so disagreements later have something to point back to.
Two fields are easy to skip and matter most once real friction shows up. Communication norms — which channel is for what, expected response times, how often the team actually meets — heads off the vague "we should communicate better" complaint before it ever gets said out loud. Ground rules & conflict resolution does the same for disagreement itself: agree on how the team handles conflict while everyone's calm, not in the middle of one.
Draft the charter together rather than having one person write it and share it — a charter nobody helped write rarely gets followed. Once it's agreed, set a review cadence, since a growing or changing team usually needs to revisit it.
Especially useful for newly formed teams, teams going through a restructure, or teams that have been operating on unspoken assumptions that are starting to cause friction.
What’s inside
Columns included
Task types
Custom fields
Key features
- Purpose, roles, and decision rights in one shared document
- Communication norms field to define channels, response times, and meeting cadence up front
- Ground rules & conflict resolution field agreed before disagreements happen, not during one
- Built as a team discussion, not a top-down memo
- Review cadence field to keep the charter current
- Task types to separate new-team charters from re-chartering
- Reference point for resolving disagreements about how the team works
Who is this template for?
- Newly formed teams setting up how they'll work
- Teams going through a restructure or merger
- Engineering teams codifying decision-making norms
- Cross-functional squads formed for a specific initiative
- Team leads revisiting norms after repeated friction
How to use this template
Use this board to draft, agree, and periodically revisit how the team actually wants to work together.
Step 1
Draft purpose, roles, and norms together
Write the first draft as a team discussion, not a document one person hands to everyone else.
Step 2
Agree on how the team communicates
Write down which channel is for what, how fast a response is expected, and how often the team actually meets — this is what heads off "we should communicate better" turning into a vague, unresolved complaint six months in.
Step 3
Set ground rules and how disagreements get resolved
Agree on baseline behavioral expectations and a conflict resolution approach while everyone's calm, so there's already a shared reference the first time a disagreement actually gets heated.
Step 4
Agree on decision rights and roles
Be explicit about who decides what, so disagreements later have a shared reference instead of becoming a power struggle.
Step 5
Set a review cadence
Revisit the charter as the team grows or changes — a charter that never gets updated stops reflecting how the team actually works.
Frequently asked questions
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