Sub-teams
Group sub-teams underneath a parent team. Feature settings configured in the parent team drive alignment throughout the group.
Overview
Sub-teams allow you to reflect your organization's structure in Linear, making it easier to understand and manage work across different levels of your company. Create new sub-teams to organize work into specialized units as your organization scales while keeping existing workflows standard within the group.
Concepts like issue statuses, cycles, and labels set in a parent team are inherited by its sub-teams, allowing sub-teams to operate well both as individual units and as a unified whole.
Basics
Update an existing team to a sub-team
Go to Settings > Teams > Team hierarchy and select another existing team as its parent. Taking this action requires admin permissions. To protect the privacy of private teams, a private parent team may have only private sub-teams.
Create a new sub-team
When creating a new team, optionally designate it as a sub-team at creation. To protect the privacy of private teams, a private parent team may have only private sub-teams.
Configure a sub-team
Once you've created a sub-team, a wizard will take you through any conflicts that need to be resolved. Common tasks include normalizing statuses between parent and sub-teams and resolving duplicate label conflicts.
After configuring a sub-team, check its settings to customize features unique to that team (GitHub PR automations, for instance) to ensure they meet the sub-team's needs.
Parent team feature settings inherited by sub-teams
Certain settings from a parent team are enforced throughout all sub-teams.
| Feature | Inheritance by sub-teams |
|---|---|
| Membership | Members in a sub-team must also be members of the parent team. Guests are the exception to this and may belong to a sub-team but not its parent. |
| Status | Sub-teams use identical statuses to their parent team. |
| Cycles | If a parent team has a cycles schedule defined, all sub-teams will inherit the same schedule. If the parent has no schedule then sub-teams may define their own. When merging a sub-team cycle schedule with a parent's, past cycles remain untouched. The current cycle on the subteam will close, and upcoming cycles of the sub-team update to the closest parent cycles. |
| Estimates | Optionally, sub-teams can elect to inherit estimation settings from their parent team. |
Parent team feature settings accessible to sub-teams
Sub-teams benefit from other features used in the parent team, and retain the flexibility to create similar entities scoped to the sub-team.
| Feature | Use in sub-team |
|---|---|
| Labels | Issues in a sub-team can use labels scoped to the sub-team, its parent team, or the workspace. |
| Templates | Issues in a sub-team can use a template scoped to the sub-team, its parent team, or the workspace. |
| Views | Sub-teams can have dedicated views. Issues in sub-teams are accessible in the views stored in their parent teams. |
Independent feature settings in sub-teams
Other features in sub-teams have no relation to the parent team and should be customized to meet the needs of the sub-team specifically. These include
- Team timezone
- Recurring issues
- Team Slack notifications
- GitHub/GitLab automations
Private parent and sub-teams
If a parent team is private, its sub-teams must also be private. If a parent team is public, its sub-teams may be public or private.
As with all private teams in Linear, a user can see private team-specific data only when they belong to the private team themselves.
As an example, given a private parent team A with private sub-teams B and C, a user belonging to A and C cannot see issues belonging to B, even if those issues are in a project or view shared with teams A and C. If there is a project shared between teams B and C, this user would only see issues belonging to team C in the project.