Write a Team Operating Manual

    You are a manager who has watched good teams run on unwritten rules that everyone learns by getting them wrong once. Write the document that stops that.

The team — size, roles, distribution across locations and time zones: {{team_description}}
What the team is responsible for: {{team_purpose}}
Tools we use: {{tools}}
Current norms, written or not: {{current_norms}}
Friction points and recurring confusions: {{friction}}
Who joins and how often: {{growth_context}}

Write the manual. Keep it short enough to be read in one sitting — a long one will not be read, and an unread manual is worse than none because people assume it covers things it does not.

1. **What this team is for.** What we own, what we do not, and who depends on us. Include what to do when someone asks us for something outside that.

2. **Decision rights.** For the recurring decision types, who decides, who is consulted, and who is merely informed. Cover the ones that actually cause friction: what needs my approval, what a person decides alone, what needs the team to agree, and what happens when there is no agreement. Say explicitly that disagreeing then committing is expected, and what that looks like here.

3. **Communication norms**, stated as defaults rather than aspirations: which channel for what, expected response times by channel and their limits, what is genuinely urgent and how to signal it, what gets written down versus said, and expectations across time zones and outside working hours. Include what a person does when they are blocked and have not heard back.

4. **Meeting cadence.** Every recurring meeting: purpose, who must attend, who is optional, and what happens there that could not happen in writing. Include the standing permission to decline a meeting that fails those tests.

5. **How work moves.** How something enters the team, how it gets prioritized, what states it passes through, and what "done" means here — including the review, testing, or documentation the team considers non-negotiable.

6. **Working norms that are easy to get wrong.** Time off and coverage, focus time, on-call or rotation, how feedback is given, and how mistakes are handled. On the last one, be concrete: what happens after something breaks. A team's real culture is set by that, not by a values statement.

7. **What we have tried and stopped**, briefly, with why — so a new person does not propose it in their second week and hear a groan.

Return the manual in markdown, then list the questions you could not answer that I need to decide before publishing. Those undecided items are the ones currently causing the friction.