Skip to main content

Define your teams

Teams in Hotpot should mirror your company's teams. The Smart Scheduler automatically creates coverage for every team you set up.

To get started with Hotpot, define at least one team!

Create a team​

To create a team:

  1. Click the Teams tab at the top of the Hotpot app.
  2. Click Create new team.
  3. Give your team a name and select the time zone in which it operates.

Easy! But it may help to know:

  • Team names must be unique.
  • If you're a wee startup with no formal teams, enter whatever name best suits you. Many folks start with "Engineering" or the like.
  • Although a team may have members worldwide, it usually adheres to a "social" time zone for handoffs and other operations, so use that.
  • When you create a team, a slug is automatically assigned, a unique string that identifies the team. For example the "API Operations" team may be assigned the slug api-operations. This slug is used in Hotpot for shift naming and more.
Schedule now or later

Hotpot will prompt you to set up a team schedule by default. You can skip this if you don't need an on-call schedule yet or if you want to defer it to later.

Invite teammates​

After you create a team, you're ready to invite your teammates. You will be prompted to do this after completing the steps above, but you may also invite new users at any time.

You can invite a user to Hotpot by clicking the Users tab from Hotpot's root navigation and then clicking Invite user. When you create the invitation you may preselect the teams that the user should be added to!

Each user you invite receives an email with a unique code allowing them to join your organization and set their password. When users join Hotpot, they should set their local time zone and working hours so the Smart Scheduler knows their base availability. (Both are done in the app, under [profile icon] > Your Settings.)