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Team charter template
A team's mission, scope, members and roles, ways of working, rituals, decision rights and how to reach them
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Team charter: Platform Reliability
Team lead: Ines Moreau · Date: 2026-09-01
Mission
Keep Ostara Labs' customer-facing services fast and available, and make it safe for every product team to ship several times a day.
Scope
In scope
- Production infrastructure: Kubernetes clusters, load balancers, the managed Postgres fleet
- Deployment pipeline and feature flag service
- Monitoring, alerting and the on-call rota for shared services
- Incident command for any Sev 1 or Sev 2
Not in scope (and who owns it instead)
- Application bugs inside product services: the owning product team
- Laptops, SSO and office network: IT
- Data warehouse and analytics pipelines: Data Platform
Members and roles
| Name |
Role |
Focus |
| Ines Moreau |
Engineering manager |
People, priorities, stakeholder asks |
| Tariq Hassan |
Staff engineer |
Architecture, capacity planning |
| Mia Chen |
Senior engineer |
Deployment pipeline |
| Leo Andersson |
Engineer |
Observability and alerting |
| Grace Obi |
Engineer |
Databases |
Ways of working
- Working hours and time zones: Berlin and Toronto; core overlap 15:00 to 18:00 CET
- Where work is tracked: the Platform board, one ticket per change
- How we review work: every change gets one reviewer; anything touching production networking gets two
- Response time we aim for: requests acknowledged within one working day
Rituals
| Ritual |
When |
Length |
Purpose |
| Standup |
Daily, 15:15 CET |
15 min |
Blockers and on-call handover |
| Planning |
Every other Monday |
45 min |
Pick the next two weeks of work |
| Retro |
Every other Friday |
30 min |
One change to how we work |
| Incident review |
Thursdays |
30 min |
Walk through last week's incidents |
Decision rights
| Decision |
Decides |
Consulted |
Informed |
| Priorities for the quarter |
Ines |
Product leads, Tariq |
Engineering all-hands |
| Technical or process choices |
Tariq |
Whole team |
Affected product teams |
| Hiring |
Ines |
Tariq, one engineer |
VP Engineering |
How to reach us
- Channel: #platform-help
- Request intake: the Platform request form, triaged every morning
- Urgent issues: page the on-call engineer through the incident tool
- What to include: the problem, the deadline and who is affected
Success measures
- 99.95% availability for the API gateway each month
- Median deploy time under 12 minutes
- Every Sev 1 reviewed within five working days
The template
Show the blank template
Team charter
Team lead: [your name] · Date: [date]
Mission
One or two sentences: why this team exists and who it serves. If it reads like a slogan, make it more specific.
Scope
What we own end to end, and what we deliberately do not. The "not in scope" list saves the most arguments.
In scope
Not in scope (and who owns it instead)
Members and roles
Ways of working
How we actually work, written down so new people do not have to guess.
- Working hours and time zones:
- Where work is tracked:
- How we review work:
- Response time we aim for:
Rituals
| Ritual |
When |
Length |
Purpose |
| Standup |
|
|
|
| Planning |
|
|
|
| Retro |
|
|
|
Decision rights
Who decides what. Name a person or a role, not "the team".
| Decision |
Decides |
Consulted |
Informed |
| Priorities for the quarter |
|
|
|
| Technical or process choices |
|
|
|
| Hiring |
|
|
|
How to reach us
Where other teams should go, and what to include so we can help quickly.
- Channel:
- Request intake:
- Urgent issues:
- What to include: the problem, the deadline and who is affected
Success measures
How we know the team is doing its job. Two or three measures, reviewed each quarter.
Questions
- Who writes the charter?
- The team lead drafts it, and the whole team edits it together; a charter nobody agreed to is just a memo
- How often should it change?
- Review it every quarter, and whenever the team's scope or membership changes
- What goes in "not in scope"?
- The things people keep asking you for that belong to someone else, with who that is
Fill it with your agent
Connect Claude to reph over MCP, then paste this. The draft arrives as suggestions you accept or reject section by section. How to connect Claude.
Find my reph doc "Team charter" with search_docs, then read it with read_doc. Draft mission and scope from the planning docs or OKRs I link, members from the org chart and rituals from the team calendar. Treat unclear ownership as an open question rather than a guess. File it with suggest_edit, one replace_section op per section (heading line kept) so each can be accepted alone. Ask each open question (work the team may not own, decisions with no owner) with add_comment quoting that section's heading line, then call request_review with a one-line summary.
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