Teams vs Groups

Waydev has two ways to organize people: Teams and Groups. At first glance they may seem interchangeable, but they solve different problems and are designed to be used together.

What is a Team?

A Team is Waydev's representation of your company's real reporting structure. Teams are created and managed exclusively by workspace admins, and they are hierarchical by design—a parent team can contain any number of nested sub-teams, mirroring the way your org chart is laid out. Because of this, Teams are relatively stable: they change when your organization changes, not on a day-to-day basis.

Every user in Waydev belongs to a primary team, and all reporting in the platform is anchored to this structure by default. If you want Waydev's data to reflect how your engineering organization is actually divided—by squad, by product area, by department—Teams are the right tool.

One important detail: a team lead is not automatically counted as a contributor to their team. Leadership and contribution are treated as separate things in Waydev, so if a team lead is also writing code alongside their team, they need to be explicitly added as a contributor.

What is a Group?

A Group is a flexible, user-defined collection of people that exists independently of the org chart. Groups don't need to follow any hierarchy, and they can be created by workspace admins or by any user designated as a Group Owner. Membership is either managed manually or kept automatically in sync with an existing team using the Sync to Teams option.

Groups are best suited for situations where you need to slice data in a way that cuts across formal team boundaries. A group might bring together engineers from three different squads who are all contributing to a shared platform initiative, or it might isolate a particular role or seniority level across the organization for benchmarking purposes.

Like team leads, Group owners are not automatically counted as members of their group. If an owner is actively contributing to the work the group tracks, they should be added as a member explicitly.

Choosing between the two

The simplest way to think about it: use Teams to model your org chart, and use Groups to answer questions your org chart can't. Teams give you the stable, trusted baseline that powers Waydev's reports. Groups give you the flexibility to explore patterns and cohorts that don't fit neatly into that baseline.

Both can be used as filter dimensions in Waydev reports, so you're never locked into viewing data only through the lens of your formal hierarchy.