Sharing a Role
How several Workers fill one Role through a split, by lane, with a primary and a backup, so nothing is done twice and nothing is dropped.
A Role can hold more than one Worker. Its split says which Worker acts on which Verbs, which watches, and which escalates, so nothing is done twice and nothing falls between them.
One Role, several Workers
The Role keeps what makes it a Role: the outcome it owns, its Metrics, its Permissions, and the Role it escalates to. Only the work is divided. A Customer who writes to the Role's address gets one answer, whoever gives it.
Three shapes cover most Startups:
- A Human and an Agent: a cofounder joins the Sales Lead Role and takes the largest Deals, and the Agent keeps the rest.
- Two Agents: a second Agent backs up the first, or takes a language the first does not speak.
- Several Humans and an Agent: licensed reviewers share one queue of Reserved Acts while the Agent prepares every file.
Splitting a Role beats creating a new one. A new Role adds a handoff, an owner, and a Metric that can disagree with the old one. A shared Role keeps one owner and one number.
The split
The split is a table on the Role. Each row names a Verb, a decision class, and what each Worker does with it: act, watch, or escalate.
Take a managed bookkeeping service for online stores, where the Customer Lead Role is shared between an Agent and an accountant.
| Work | Stakes | Agent | Accountant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reply to a Conversation | Two-way | act | watch |
| Refund up to $500 | Two-way, money | act | watch |
| Refund above $500 | One-way, money | escalate | act |
| Move a client to another plan | One-way, customer | act | watch |
| Sign a tax filing | Reserved Act | prepares | act |
A joining Human gets a default split: the one-way decisions in their domain, every act reserved for a person, and the watcher seat. The Agent keeps everything else. The tryout's results move rows from that default, Verb by Verb.
A watcher sees each Action while its delay window is open, and can pause, redirect, or cancel it. Watching is never approving: an Action nobody touches runs when its window closes.
Lanes
A lane routes each Task to exactly one Worker. Startups draw lanes three ways:
- By Verb, as the split does: refunds to one Worker, plan moves to another.
- By Limit tier: the same Verb goes to the Agent below a threshold and to the Human above it.
- By Customer: named accounts belong to the Human, and everyone else to the Agent.
A Task that matches no lane goes to the Role's primary Worker. A Task that matches two lanes is a bug in the split, and the Role's owner fixes it.
Primary and backup
Every lane has a primary Worker and a backup. The backup takes the Task when the primary is away, over capacity, or silent past the Task's response time. No Task waits on an absent Worker.
A Human marks themselves away, and their lanes fall to the backup at once. Approvals they hold reroute to the next Worker with authority for that decision class. Acts only they can perform, such as a filing under their Credential, go to a second credentialed Worker or to the officer desk.
Pooled claim
Some work suits a pool better than a lane. Several Workers share one queue, and the first to claim a Task owns it. A claim left untouched past its window is released to the pool.
Each Worker in a pool has a work-in-progress limit, so one fast Worker never hoards the queue. The licensed reviewers above claim filings from one pool, and the Agent tops up the queue as each file is ready.
One record
Every Worker in a shared Role acts through the same Verbs and Interfaces. Each Action records who acted, in which Role, and under which Mandate. The Role's Metrics count all of it; each Worker's share of it reads the same record, filtered to them.
A split is a definition, so it changes like one: a Change, previewed, with a Decision behind it. The incumbent Agent works a sample of the Human's Tasks in shadow. Every row of the split carries Evidence for whoever holds it.