Team norms

Decide together before the rush

Hero prompting (one person, one clever chat, one silent paste into production) does not scale. Teams need a short charter that answers the same questions every time.

This chapter is a working session: leave with five bullets published where people already work.

Questions the charter must answer

Which data never goes into a model? Customer dumps, credentials, regulated categories, unpublished strategy.
Which outputs need human review? External email, pricing, legal-sounding text, anything irreversible.
How do you label AI-assisted work? For teammates, customers, and auditors. Silence is not a policy.
Who owns the final call? Role, not “whoever finished the prompt.”
When do we refuse the tool? Point to When not to use AI and name your local pause cases.
Where do lessons live? A shared ops log beats tribal memory after failure modes.

A light team charter (copy and edit)

Publish five to seven bullets. Example shape (rewrite for your org):

No secrets, credentials, or regulated personal data in consumer model UIs.
External-facing text gets a human owner and a verify pass before send.
AI-assisted drafts are labeled in the ticket or doc header until accepted.
Decisions are not delegated to a model; brainstorm and decide stay separate.
Skip days and pause cases are success. Speed is not a virtue when checks fail.
Incidents get a named failure mode and one new rule within a week.

Revisit quarterly or after any incident that surprised you.

Rituals that make norms real

Ritual	Cadence	Purpose
Charter read-through	Onboarding + quarterly	New hires see the rules before the first rush
Verify buddy	Per high-stakes send	Second eyes on numbers and claims
Ops log line	After each notable miss	Mode, miss, new rule
Tool allowlist review	Quarterly	What is approved; what is banned

If a ritual only exists in a slide deck, it is not a norm yet.

Anti-patterns

Shadow prompting - people use forbidden tools because official ones are slow. Fix access, do not only punish.
Checkbox theater - “I verified” with no source. Require the link or screenshot of the primary check.
Charter as wallpaper - long PDF nobody opens. Five bullets in the chat topic or wiki home beat a forty-page policy nobody reads.
One hero’s workflow - if only one person can run the prompt chain, you do not have a team practice.

Facilitation (30 minutes)

List the last five AI-assisted tasks the team shipped (10 min)
Mark each: safe / needs review / should have paused (5 min)
Draft or amend the five bullets (10 min)
Assign owners for verify buddy and ops log (5 min)

Stop when the bullets are short enough to paste into Slack or Teams.

Practice

Run the thirty-minute session this week. Publish the charter. Link it from your team home. Send one sentence to PromptUnleashed corrections only if you find a gap in our public Guide that blocked you.