Forty desks, one chair: a head office for your bot teams

Somewhere past twenty Bots and five businesses, a flat team starts to strain: long briefings, a crowded approval queue, two businesses wanting the same Bot on the same day. Chapter 7 is about adding layers and a head office so it scales.

Three layers

• You: set direction, approve anything important, decide what to start or stop.
• Managers: one per business plus one for the head office. They keep their team moving, collect what needs your yes and report in a few lines.
• Workers: every Bot with a specific job.

Managers reach workers by messaging them directly or in small group chats. When something is actually sent or published, you do that in a one-to-one chat with the Bot that owns it, so you see exactly what's going out.

The head office

Some jobs belong to the whole group, not one business. The book adds a bookkeeping Bot that gathers numbers from every business and drafts a monthly summary but never pays or moves money, and a quality Bot that reads every draft on the approval list before you and flags wrong prices, broken links or claims that sound too strong. You still read everything; you just read it with a second pair of eyes behind you.

Checklist

1. Give every business a manager whose card says it can't approve on your behalf.
2. Ask all managers for the same four-line report: Done, Waiting on you, Stuck, Next.
3. Have the briefing Bot roll the reports up so you can scan every business in minutes.
4. Set a simple priority list for shared Bots, such as launches first, then deadlines, then everything else, and have the head office manager ask you only on ties.
5. If one business needs a shared Bot all the time, give it its own.
6. Monthly, have the head office manager report idle, overloaded and overlapping Bots.
7. Keep one approval queue, not six, already checked by the quality Bot.

Keeping it from sprawling

Every Bot has a card and a manager, with no exceptions. Retire Bots freely when a job ends, and save their notes. If a manager's "Stuck" line is always empty, ask it a direct question now and then, like what the slowest part of its team's week is.