Inviting your first ten people
Getting ten people into a new company takes about fifteen minutes if you set the teams up first, and considerably longer if you do not.
Use this when
- You have just bought a Team plan and the company is empty apart from you.
- A new squad is joining an established company.
- You are moving a group off shared join codes onto per-person invitations.
What you need before starting
- The ten email addresses.
- A decision about which teams exist. Teams are groups of people, not projects.
- A decision about who is a member, who is a viewer, and who — if anyone — is a billing admin.
- Enough seats. Check Assigned against Purchased on Seats and billing before you start. Viewers do not need one.
Step-by-step flow
- Create the teams first. Open Teams and create them. Invitations can pre-assign teams, but only teams that already exist, and a bulk CSV naming a team that does not exist fails that row.
- Decide the roles. Most people are members. Read-only people are viewers and cost no seat. Your finance contact is a billing admin, and will not be able to see roadmap content — that is intended.
- Bulk-invite. Open People and click Bulk invite (CSV). Paste one person per line:
email,role,teams,team_role
[email protected],member,Platform;Growth,editor
[email protected],billing_admin,,viewer
[email protected],viewer,Platform,viewerSeparate several teams with a semicolon. The header row is optional. Roadmap Flow reports the rows it skipped and why.
- Copy every link. The result dialog lists each address next to its invitation link. Copy the whole block into a scratch document before you close it. Email sending is not configured, so these links are how people get in.
- Send them. One message per person, to the address the invitation was issued for. A link is per person; forwarding one is not a shortcut.
- Check in after a couple of days. Open Invitations. Anything still Pending has not been acted on. Resend it — that issues a fresh link and invalidates the old one.
What good looks like
- Everyone is on the right team from their first sign-in, with no follow-up round of "can you also add me to…".
- Assigned seats match the number of people who should have one, and viewers do not appear in that number.
- The Invitations page has no stale pending rows a fortnight later.
- The audit log has one clean intake, all on the same day.
Common traps
- Inviting people before creating the teams, then adding everyone to teams by hand afterwards.
- Closing the bulk result dialog without copying the links. You can resend each one, but that is ten dialogs you did not need to open.
- Sending one person's link to somebody else because it was easier. It is tied to the address it was issued for and grants the role that address was given.
- Making everybody a company admin "for now". Ten administrators is not a starting position, it is an incident waiting for a calendar slot.
- Forgetting that invitations expire after 14 days. Somebody on holiday will need a resend.