A project manager is the coordinating agent for one project. Its value is continuity: it connects the goal to the right specialist, tracks dependencies and blockers, reviews the output, and keeps the project's status understandable.
A manager is especially useful when a result needs several contributions, may span multiple conversations, or must be checked against a shared objective. You can still work directly with a team agent on a clear specialist task.
What the manager does
Current source defines the manager's responsibilities as:
- Clarify and track project objectives, blockers, progress, and review state.
- Choose suitable project agents based on their responsibilities and capabilities.
- Delegate execution, coordinate dependencies, and inspect the returned work.
- Maintain project documentation and provide advice or explanations.
- Keep completed work and remaining work distinguishable.
Coding, research, design, marketing, and operational execution are assigned to suitable teammates, even if the manager has tools that could perform part of the task. If no suitable teammate exists, it should tell you which role is missing, ask you to have the space assistant add it, and keep the work pending rather than silently changing an unrelated agent's role.
This responsibility model is source-backed. The live manager-only walkthrough exercised documentation: Documentation Lead created the fictional welcome checklist and its associated objective.
Give the manager an outcome
A good brief leaves the manager room to coordinate while making the acceptance criteria clear:
Prepare an evidence-backed welcome guide for fictional Acme teammates. Use the project brief, have the relevant specialists check facts and readability if available, and bring the final document to me for review. Show any missing role or source instead of inventing it.
For larger work, include the deadline, sources, expected deliverables, and actions that require your review. The manager can turn that into tracked work and specialist assignments; a task brief is not itself evidence that those records were saved.
Understand the benefit over direct agent use
| Approach | Best fit | What you need to keep explicit |
|---|---|---|
| Ask the manager | Several contributions, dependencies, blockers, or a project-level result | Outcome, acceptance criteria, review point |
| Ask a specialist directly | A focused task or correction within its expertise | Exact scope, relevant references, how the result feeds back into the project |
| Ask the space assistant | Project setup or coordination across projects | Project names, responsible manager, requested action or update |
The manager reduces the coordination you need to do yourself. It does not remove the need to check important results or give approval for consequential actions.
Decide when the manager checks the project
You can ask the manager directly, select Run check for an immediate manual check, configure Project Flow to respond to objective events, or configure Heartbeats for inactivity-based and timed reviews.
Find Project Flow at Dashboard → Objectives → Project flow. Its run-condition checkboxes and separate objective-review toggle save when changed. Heartbeat cadence lives under Workflows → Heartbeats, not in that panel. These mechanisms are separate from a specialist's cron job or one-off scheduled task.
A queued check is not a completed result. The manager can defer while other work or required input is pending, and a heartbeat can finish quietly if there is nothing useful to report.
Follow delegated work
Ask for the owner, current state, output, and next dependency:
Which parts of this objective are delegated? Show who owns each part, what is waiting, and the output I should review next.
In Flexible chats, focused delegated tasks have their own history and review lifecycle. In Persistent team, requests arrive in the relevant agent's ongoing conversation. The delegation guide explains why the same request can appear differently in these modes.
A specialist finishing its answer is one event. The manager accepting that work, the objective entering Review, and your approving it when user review is enabled are separate events.
Review the saved result
Open Dashboard → Objectives and the linked artifact. Compare the work with the brief before choosing Approve and complete. The documentation demo verified this transition from Review to Completed.
Check status notes separately. A completed objective can coexist with an older written summary until it is updated. Ask the manager to reconcile the summary when it no longer reflects the current state.
Keep the project small enough to understand
Start with a manager and only the specialists the goal actually needs. A documentation task may be handled by the manager itself; a software change typically needs an execution specialist and the correct codebase context. More agents are useful when they provide distinct expertise or parallel work, not simply because a larger team is available.
See Agents and teams for staffing and shared configuration, or Space assistant when the project needs another role.