Private teams

Create private teams for issues that should only be accessed by certain workspace members.

Overview⁠

This feature is available on Linear's Business and Enterprise plans. Anyone in the workspace can create a new private team. Only workspace owners, admins, and team owners can change visibility of an existing team.

Private teams are helpful in cases where:

• Work is sensitive and should be limited to only some team members (e.g. HR, customer data, founders or exec team).
• You want a personal team to keep track of issues.

Visibility⁠

Private team: On Enterprise plans, only workspace owners can see all private teams in Settings > Administration > Teams, update team settings, or join a private team by adding themselves as a member. Workspace admins cannot view private teams unless they are already members.

On other paid plans, workspace admins can see all private teams in Settings > Administration > Teams, update team settings, or join a private team by adding themselves as a member.

If an admin or owner attempts to join a private team, they will receive a pop-up warning before confirming.

Issues: Those who are not a member of the private team will not be able to see issues associated with the team. You cannot @ mention a member in an issue in the private team if they are not already a member of the private team. See specific exceptions under Share issues from a private team.

Projects created under public teams: Projects created under public teams can also be shared with private teams. Only private team members will be able to see that the project has been associated with their team. Similarly, project issues related to the private team will only be visible to members of that team.

If all public teams are removed from the project, it will become private and only visible to members of the private team from then on.

Projects created under private teams: Projects created under private teams are visible to the private team members only. If the project is shared with a public team later on, the project will become visible to others. The name of the private team or issues from that team do not become visible to non-members.

Initiatives: Members of a private team can see its projects on the associated initiatives but those projects won't be visible to others.

Configure⁠

When creating teams from workspace settings, toggle the option Make team private.

To make an existing team private or vice versa, go to your team's settings (right-click on the team from your sidebar) and then Access and permissions > Change team visibility.

Any assignees that are not members of the private team will be removed and any subscribers to issues in the newly private team will be unsubscribed.

Private team members⁠

The person who creates a private team or converts an existing team to private becomes the default owner of the private team.

Owners of a private team can go to Members (from the team's settings page) to invite other workspace members to the team or promote an existing team member to team owner (admins can search for the team from Settings > Administration > Teams and then select the three dot menu to access this page).

Members of a private team can leave the team on their own, but they won't be able to re-join the team without an explicit invite.

Share issues from a private team⁠

Share an issue on a private team through the ⌘/Ctrl + K menu, or by selecting the Share action in an issue's overflow menu. When an issue is shared, a banner at the top of the issue indicates whom it's shared with. Any team members can share or stop sharing an issue in that team.

This can be useful for cases where a user requires access to a particular issue, but not the wider team. Consider a private Security team sharing a vulnerability with specific developers—or an HR team that needs a manager to fulfill a sensitive task.

Managing shared issues⁠

When you share a team's issue with another user, they can view the issue and any of its sub-issues on the same team, sub-issues of those sub-issues, and so on. If an issue has sub-issues on a different team, it is not sharable.

Users you share with can also leave comments, and change basic properties like assignee, status, priority or label. They cannot view projects associated with that issue or share the issue with others.

When an issue is shared with you, it appears in My issues under the Shared tab, and you’ll be notified in your Inbox. You can view and update the issue and any of its sub-issue tree, but cannot view projects or cycles associated with that issue or share the issue with others.

Exports⁠

When exporting issues from the workspace using our Export tool, admins can choose to include issues from any private team.

API Security Considerations⁠

If your workspace has set up custom integrations or apps or is working with third party integrations, please consider their behavior and who has access to their output when adding private team data to Linear issues.

The API, webhooks, and integrations such as Zapier can expose a user's private team and issue titles. It's possible to access private issue data with the API if you are using a personal API key of a user that has access to private teams. Webhooks can also expose data from private teams as webhooks for private teams can be set up by team owners and workspace admins.

Integrations⁠

Some existing integrations have limitations to account for private data, while others will have more complete access to all workspace contents.