Team-brain starter kit: a shared team brain in 14 days

Practicum for Volume 2, Chapter 3, "A Team with Agents." Version: 2026-06. For a manager or founder. This follows the Agent Contract. Once agents have boundaries, give them shared context. Without it, each agent fails in its own way.

Agents and new team members can only work with the context they receive. A "team-brain" is a small shared knowledge repository. It is not a year-long corporate wiki project. It is a handful of files that an agent reads first.

Minimum structure

team-brain/
  product/        - what we make, who it is for, and the main metrics
  customers/      - who the customer is and what we know about them
  decisions/      - decision log (decisions.md)
  glossary/       - team terms (the agent reads these first)
  skills/         - reusable instructions and prompts

You do not need more folders. Five active files beat thirty empty ones.

Decision log (`decisions/decisions.md`)

Use one line per decision so agents and new colleagues do not have to ask why it was made:

Date | Decision | Context (why) | Alternatives rejected | Owner | Review date

Memory: three states

New knowledge moves through three states so the shared brain does not fill with junk:

staged: a candidate has been recorded but is not yet shared, like a memory draft;
review: a person has checked that it is true and reusable;
prompted: it is now part of the context that the agent actually reads.

Nothing moves from staged to prompted without a person.

Agent evaluation template

Before you trust an agent with a task, run it with and without the context and compare the results.

Task	Inputs	What counts as a good answer	Score without team-brain	Score with team-brain	Decision
`____`	`____`	`____`	`_/5`	`_/5`	`____`

If there is no difference, the context is not working, or the task does not depend on context.

14-day plan

Days 1-3. Find one bottleneck where the team loses time by explaining the same thing again.
Days 4-7. Collect the minimum knowledge for it in product/, customers/, and the first entries in decisions/.
Days 8-14. Launch one agent with an Agent Contract. Run the evaluation with and without context. Keep it only if the difference is measurable.

Give each agent its own Agent Contract with a role, boundaries, and owner.
Decide what the agent may do and what a person should keep with the Human Review Matrix.
Follow the full route in the Volume 2 Workbook.

Version: 2026-06. The goal is a few files that become useful quickly, not a corporate wiki project.