Crews that mirror the customer's team

A role-based crew assigns each agent a job description (role, goal, backstory), gives each unit of work a task with an expected output, and runs the tasks under a process: a fixed sequence, or a manager that decides who does what. That structure invites you to copy the customer's team. Copy the parts that carry meaning: who does which work, who may hand work to whom, and above all who holds authority to commit the organisation. Agents can hold the work. Consequential authority (sending a customer notice, changing a delivery date in SAP, waiving demurrage) stays with named humans or deterministic code, and the crew's design must make that structural, not a line in a prompt. Between roles, pass typed contracts rather than prose, validate them in code, and treat any agent that produces fields outside its contract as drifting out of its role.

Key takeaways:

• Map work, not boxes. An agent per role only where the role is also a context, permission or ownership boundary.
• Delegation moves work; it must never move authority or tool scope.
• Every handoff between roles is a schema with required fields, provenance and a validation step.
• Prefer a sequential process or a Flow for known procedures; use a manager only where the path genuinely varies, and log every delegation.
• Test roles like services: contract tests first, crew runs second.