Creating Organizations & Teams

Unpack uses a two-level hierarchy to organize your workspace: organizations contain teams, and teams contain retrospectives and other ceremonies. This guide explains how each level works and walks you through creating and configuring both.

Understanding organizations and teams

Before diving into setup, it helps to understand how organizations and teams relate to each other and to the rest of Unpack.

Organizations

An organization is the top-level container for everything in Unpack. It typically maps to your company, department, or business unit. Organizations control:

• Billing and subscription — plans are managed at the organization level.
• Member directory — everyone who belongs to the organization can be assigned to one or more teams.
• Global settings — default retrospective templates, branding, and integrations.
• Data ownership — all retrospective data, action items, and analytics belong to the organization.

Teams

Teams sit inside an organization and represent the groups that run ceremonies together. They typically correspond to your engineering squads, product teams, or cross-functional groups. Each team has its own:

• Retrospective history and action item backlog.
• Sprint cadence and scheduling preferences.
• Member list (a subset of the organization's members).
• Dashboard with team-specific health trends and metrics.

Creating an organization

If you did not create an organization during onboarding, or if you need to set up an additional one, follow these steps.

1. Click your avatar in the top-left corner of the sidebar to open the workspace switcher.
2. Select Create new organization at the bottom of the dropdown.
3. Enter the organization name. Choose something recognizable to your teammates, such as your company name or department.
4. Set the URL slug. This is a permanent, lowercase identifier used in links (e.g., app.unpack.dev/acme-corp). It cannot be changed after creation.
5. Optionally, upload a logo. This appears in the sidebar, email notifications, and shared links.
6. Click Create organization. You will be redirected to your new organization's dashboard.

Organization settings

After creating your organization, take a moment to configure the key settings under Organization Settings in the sidebar.

• General — update the organization name, logo, and description.
• Members — invite people, manage roles, and configure domain-based auto-join (so anyone with a matching email domain can join without an explicit invite).
• Defaults — set the default retrospective template, voting limits, and timer durations that apply to all new retrospectives across the organization.
• Integrations — connect Slack, Jira, or other tools at the organization level so all teams can use them.
• Billing — view your current plan, update payment methods, and manage your subscription.

Creating teams

Once your organization is set up, create teams for each group that runs retrospectives together.

1. Navigate to your organization's dashboard and click New team in the sidebar, or use the + button next to the "Teams" section header.
2. Enter the team name. This should match what your team calls itself (e.g., "Payments Squad", "Growth Team", "Backend Platform").
3. Add an optional description to help new members understand the team's scope and purpose.
4. Select the sprint cadence for this team:
   • 1-week sprints — common for fast-moving teams or early-stage products.
   • 2-week sprints — the most common cadence for agile teams.
   • 3-week sprints — less common, but useful for teams with longer release cycles.
   • Custom — define your own cycle length in days.
5. Add team members by searching for people already in your organization. You can also skip this step and invite members later.
6. Click Create team.

Team settings and customization

Each team has its own settings page where you can fine-tune how retrospectives work for that group. Access it by clicking the gear icon next to the team name in the sidebar, or navigate to Team Settings from the team dashboard.

General settings

• Team name and description — update these at any time without affecting existing retrospectives.
• Team avatar — upload an icon or emoji to make the team easy to identify in the sidebar.
• Sprint cadence — change the sprint length. Upcoming scheduled retrospectives will adjust automatically.

Retrospective defaults

These settings apply to every new retrospective created for this team, saving you from configuring the same options each time.

• Default template — choose the column layout that new retros start with (e.g., "Start / Stop / Continue", "Mad / Sad / Glad", "4Ls", or a custom template).
• Voting limit — the maximum number of votes each participant gets during the vote phase. Defaults to 5.
• Timer durations — set default countdown timers for the reflect and discuss phases.
• Anonymous cards — whether card authors are hidden by default. This is enabled by default to encourage candid feedback.

Scheduling

You can schedule recurring retrospectives so they are created automatically at the end of each sprint.

1. Open Team Settings → Scheduling.
2. Toggle on Auto-create retrospectives.
3. Select the day and time when the retrospective should be created. It will appear in the team's retro list in draft status, ready for the facilitator to start.
4. Optionally, enable Slack reminders to notify the team channel when a new retro is ready.

Notifications

Control how team members are notified about retrospective activity.

• Email notifications — send a summary email when a retrospective is completed, including action items assigned to each person.
• Slack notifications — post updates to a Slack channel when retros start, end, or when action items are assigned.
• In-app notifications — always on. Members see a badge in the sidebar when a retro needs their attention.

Managing multiple teams

As your organization grows, you may need to manage many teams. Here are some tips for keeping things organized.

• Use clear, consistent naming — name teams after the squad or group, not the project. Projects change; teams tend to persist.
• Archive inactive teams — if a team disbands or reorganizes, archive it from Team Settings instead of deleting it. Archived teams preserve their retrospective history but no longer appear in the sidebar.
• Cross-team views — organization admins and owners can view health trends and action item progress across all teams from the organization dashboard, making it easy to spot patterns without joining every team.