As an Engineering Manager
Use Recordari as a personal assistant — status, follow-ups, and light team context.
You touch many threads — 1:1s, escalations, roadmap conversations — but you rarely write code. Recordari works well as a personal assistant: you orient for status, file a few durable things, and let your agent carry context between sessions.
This guide is about usage patterns, not workspace permissions. For who can change someone else's memory on a shared team, see When memories disagree.
The scenario
You manage a platform team running two initiatives: a payments migration and an on-call reliability push. You're in meetings most of the day. You need to walk into a 1:1 knowing what you committed to last time, and you need a quick read on what the team decided without reading every channel.
You are not trying to build the graph for the team — developers and tech leads do that. You are trying to stay oriented and not drop balls.
Two kinds of domain
Most engineering managers end up with two patterns:
| Domain | What goes there | How you use it |
|---|---|---|
Personal (e.g. personal or sam-em) | Your follow-ups, commitments, prep notes | Your assistant memory — you file and read here; keeps noise out of project domains |
Team / project (e.g. payments-platform) | Decisions the team already filed, open issues, significant milestones | Mostly read — orient and ask questions; file only when you were in the room for a decision |
Use a personal domain so your 1:1 notes do not clutter the domain the team orients on every morning. A commitment to ping platform ops belongs in your personal domain; the team's decision to postpone a launch belongs in the project domain (often filed by someone else).
What the team can see
This matters for managers. On a shared team workspace, every member — Owner, Editor, and Reader — can read every memory in that workspace via search, orient, and recall.
| What personal key gives you | What it does not give you |
|---|---|
| Memories are attributed to you | Hidden from teammates |
| Others cannot silently revise your wording | A private vault for HR material |
| You decide when asked about contradictions involving your memories | Protection if someone searches for a person's name |
A domain named personal is an organising convention, not an access-control boundary. It keeps your notes out of the team's daily project orient, but a teammate who searches the workspace can still find what you filed.
Practical rule: if the team should not see it, do not file it in the team workspace. Keep appraisals, salary, performance ratings, disciplinary notes, medical information, and raw 1:1 transcripts in your HR system or another tool with proper access controls.
| Fine in the team workspace | Keep out of the team workspace |
|---|---|
| Operational follow-ups you would say in standup ("I'll unblock staging access by Thursday") | Appraisal ratings, compensation, promotion decisions |
| Decisions you witnessed and the team should know | Performance concerns about someone their peers should not see |
| Open issues you are escalating on behalf of the team | Career judgments, PIP material, anything HR-confidential |
Domain-level privacy controls are not shipped yet. Until they are, treat the team workspace as shared by default — the same bar you would use for a team Slack channel, not a locked manager notebook.
Personal workspace (separate from the team)
Do not confuse a personal key with a personal workspace:
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Personal key | An API key tied to you within a workspace — controls attribution and who can revise your memories |
| Personal workspace | A separate workspace only you (or your solo account) use — a true privacy boundary from the team graph |
Can a workspace Owner create another workspace without signing up again? Not today. Each account gets one workspace when the org is created at recordar.io. There is no "New workspace" control in the admin portal yet.
Additional workspace creation — for example a personal manager workspace alongside the team graph — is coming soon on Team tier and above. Until then, use the separate-signup workaround below.
If you joined the team via invite, you were added to the team's workspace only; no second workspace was created for you automatically.
If you need a private graph for manager-only notes today:
- Sign up again at recordar.io with a separate email (for example a personal address you do not use for the team org). That provisions a new org and its own solo workspace.
- Open the admin portal, mint a personal key under API Keys → Personal keys, and connect your agent to that workspace — same steps as Getting Started.
- Use two connections in practice: the team workspace key for shared project work, your solo workspace key for HR-confidential material. Point each agent config (or each project) at the right key.
Until additional workspaces ship on Team tier, a separate signup is the supported way to keep manager-only memories out of the team graph. Contact admin@recordar.io if you need help wiring both workspaces up.
Start the day — orient for status
You don't need a deep technical brief every morning. You need where things stand:
"Orient on payments-platform — what changed since I was last here?"
On a shared workspace, your agent scopes recent activity to you by default, and the digest can show what others changed while you were away. When you want the whole team's pulse:
"Orient on payments-platform — show me everyone's recent activity, not just mine."
Your agent summarises — you don't run manual audits or search unless something specific comes up.
Before a 1:1
You filed a note three weeks ago that you would review the on-call runbook with Alex before the next rotation. You do not remember the exact commitment:
"Search my memory for anything about Alex and the on-call runbook."
"What did I commit to last time we talked about staging access?"
Personal-domain memories shine here — for operational follow-ups, not HR-confidential material. File short notes after 1:1s when something should carry forward and you would be comfortable with it being technically readable in the workspace:
"Remember: I owe Alex a review of the on-call runbook before next rotation."
"File a goal: reduce pages during business hours to under two per month this quarter."
Career-path conversations, performance concerns, and promotion timing belong in your HR tools, not Recordari — see What the team can see above.
Use goal for outcomes you are driving, issue for open questions you are tracking, not for every action item (those stay in your task tracker).
After a meeting where a decision was made
When you were present and the team settled something, it is worth filing — once:
"File a decision: we're deferring the EU launch until Q4 — compliance review didn't clear in time."
If a tech lead or architect will file the same thing, say so and skip duplicating. One well-linked memory beats three copies.
When you were not in the room, read instead of filing:
"What did the team decide about the EU launch?"
Trust what others filed. If orient surfaces a contradiction involving your memories, your agent will ask — see When memories disagree.
Light filing — what managers keep
| Worth filing | Usually skip |
|---|---|
| Decisions you owned or witnessed | Sprint task lists |
| Commitments you made to people | Implementation details |
| Goals and metrics you are accountable for | Duplicates of what devs already filed |
| Open issues you are escalating | Every standup update |
You are curating what you need to show up prepared, not documenting the entire programme.
A Tuesday — step by step
Morning — catch up
"Orient on payments-platform — anything I should know before standup?"
Your agent flags recent decisions, open issues, and anything in the digest (contradictions or superseded memories involving yours).
Before standup — quick scan
"Any open issues in payments-platform I should ask about?"
1:1 prep
"Search memory for Jamie — last 1:1 notes and anything I owe them."
After 1:1 — one follow-up
"Remember: Jamie is blocked on staging access — I said I'd ping platform ops by Thursday."
End of week — you were in three meetings, not one graph session
You filed two personal notes and one team decision. That is enough.
Personal assistant, not graph administrator
You do not need to:
- Connect every memory manually — your agent suggests links when it matters
- Run stale or conflict audits — orient and filing-time checks surface problems
- Revise other people's memories — if something is wrong, talk to the owner or ask a tech lead; supersede and override are rare for managers
- Learn every tool name — speak normally; the agent maps to remember, orient, search
When something needs your answer — "These two memories contradict — which holds?" — decide and move on. The agent records it.
Standing rules (planned)
Per-role setup templates (prefilled standing rules for each session) are planned but not shipped yet. Until then, file a standing memory only when you want every future session to remember a constraint you own:
"File a standing rule: always check payments-platform digest before my Monday leadership sync."
That is optional and personal — most managers rely on orient prompts rather than a long rule set.
Next steps
- Recordari by role — all role guides
- As a tech lead — keeping the team graph healthy
- As a product owner — goals and product decisions
- When memories disagree — when the team conflicts and your agent asks you
- Using Recordari with Claude Code — a developer-focused session walkthrough