4.3 The "Flow" – How One Feature Led to the Next

As soon as the idea of describing roles and collaboration was in place and the first teams started working with it, it quickly became clear: to use roles effectively, additional features were needed. This led to the creation of the teamdecoder "Toolbox" for team architects. All features build on one another – but of course, not all of them need to be used in every team.

Here’s the "Flow":

• Dashboard – This is where roles are defined, assigned, further developed, and brought together into Circles and Projects.

• Reports – This is an individual overview for each team member, where they can see which roles have been assigned to them ("My always up-to-date and detailed job description" = clarity), and who is doing what in the team (a "phone book" function = transparency). If a team member notices something in their day-to-day work that doesn't make sense or could be better defined, they can leave feedback directly in the report.

• Circles and Projects Overviews – When there's no longer a traditional org chart, managers often get nervous. While you could still create a rough overview in Miro and present it as an org chart, teamdecoder provides separate overviews for all Circles (e.g., departments) and all Projects (e.g., task forces), each showing all assigned roles and the people holding them.

• Meetings – “Too many meetings” is often a reason for inefficiency. Early on, a client had the idea to let all "groups" (i.e., Circles and Projects) define their meetings, so they could be displayed in the overviews and reports – making it easier to see the total meeting load.

• Fading Roles – It quickly became clear that role assignments aren’t always clear-cut. Sometimes people hold roles they shouldn’t really have, or it’s already decided that someone will take on Role X in the future or is developing toward it. For such cases, there are the markers "Fading In" and "Fading Out," which can be used in the individual reports to flag roles accordingly.

• Workload Planning – When you start breaking down jobs into roles and assigning multiple roles to each person, the question arises: how should the person distribute their available time across the different roles? This allows managers, the company, and/or the team to communicate expectations and set priorities. This also defines how important each role is. For example, if I work 8 hours a day and I'm supposed to spend 6 of those hours on one role, everyone needs to understand that the remaining roles will produce less output.

• Purpose Tree – Every role needs a purpose. And so does every group. And the entire team, of course. One day, a consultant had the idea to create an overview of all these purposes to see if everything aligns and makes sense. That’s the Purpose Tree.

• Workflows – As teams shape their roles, they often reach the point where they need to distinguish between roles and describe how these roles should ideally work together in a process. For that, teamdecoder offers Workflows. You can define processes, break them into steps, and assign roles to each step. This adds the crucial element of when a role needs to be active.

• Compare Mode – To support teams in exactly these detailed discussions (e.g., “Should task X belong to the Project Management or Key Account Management role?”), there's a Compare Mode. It lets you place different people or roles side by side and use drag & drop to shift roles or tasks around. This makes it easier to have discussions and implement the results directly.

• Surveys and td Score – All tools are designed to help the team improve in terms of wellbeing, resilience, and performance despite ongoing changes. To measure whether that’s actually happening, teamdecoder can send out regular surveys to team members. These results feed into the "td Score." If the score trends downward, you can respond early.

• Campfire – It’s important that the team regularly reflects on its own structure. For this, there’s a meeting format we call "Campfire." In this meeting, the team – along with the consultant and team leader – metaphorically gathers around the teamdecoder like a campfire to discuss improvements and plan for the future. The app includes a separate section where all the issues that need attention are listed (feedback from reports, workload imbalances, employee development status, missing role details, etc.).

This section isn’t about explaining how each feature works in detail (hence no screenshots yet), but rather about showing how the functionalities are interconnected and how they emerged from real-world practice.

Links

• Knowledge Base "Features": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/category/features

• Knowledge Base "Modes": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/category/modes