User Onboarding
The order you set things up matters. Inviting people before creating teams leads to rework.
Step 1: Create your teams first
Before inviting anyone, create teams around how people collaborate — not how your org chart is drawn. A team in One Horizon is a collaboration unit: people who share standups, see each other's work, and need visibility into the same progress. That doesn't have to match reporting lines.
A person can be in multiple teams if they need visibility into more than one group's work. An Observer can follow a team's standups and recaps without contributing their own work. A Coordinator manages the team: handles invites and settings without their own work showing up in the team's recaps. In One Horizon, teams are the primary unit of visibility — recaps, standups, and insights are all scoped to them.
Go to Settings > Teams and create a team for each group that needs to share work data. Keep team names consistent with what your organization actually calls these groups.
Don't create teams you're not sure about yet. Starting with fewer teams is easier to clean up than untangling a messy structure after people have joined.
It's also recommended to give each time a unique icon for better clarity. Team owners can change the team icon by clicking on it in the team settings page:
Step 2: Invite team admins/coordinators
Once your teams exist, invite the team lead or manager for each one as a Team Admin or Team Coordinator, not a regular member. Do this before inviting anyone else.
Go to Settings > Teams, select the team, and invite the team lead by email or Slack. Set their role to Team Admin or Team Coordinator during the invite.
Team leads know their members and can invite them directly. If you invite everyone yourself, you risk mapping people to the wrong teams.
Step 3: Let team leads invite their members
Once team leads are in, they handle inviting their own people. Team leads know who belongs where, and it takes the invite coordination off your plate. You can still add people directly if needed.
Roles
Workspace roles
| Role | What they can do |
|---|---|
| Workspace Owner | Manage all workspace settings, teams, integrations, and members. See data across all teams. |
| Workspace Member | Access their own team data and personal work. Cannot manage workspace settings or other teams. |
Team roles
| Role | What they can do |
|---|---|
| Team Admin | Invite and remove team members, configure team settings (standups, integrations), manage team roles. |
| Team Coordinator | Invite people into the team and configure team settings. Can view team work but doesn't contribute — their own work isn't shared with the team. |
| Team Observer | Participates in standups and views team work. No management or invite permissions. |
| Team Member | Participate in standups, view team recaps and insights, manage their own work. Cannot modify team settings. |
A Workspace Owner has full access across all teams. A Team Admin/Coordinator only has admin rights in teams they've been assigned to.
Sending invites
Invite people from Settings > Members (workspace-level) or Settings > Teams > [Team Name] (team-level).
Invites go out by email or Slack (if connected). When a user accepts their invite, the onboarding flow prompts them to connect their personal integrations (GitHub, Linear, Jira, Google Calendar) so you don't need to coordinate that separately (unless they skip those steps). See Invite Members for more details.