A guide for admins setting up Hamster at a 50+ person product org. Multiple teams, multiple repos, often multiple business units. Existing engineering platform in place. Engineers already deeply embedded with Cursor, Claude Code, or other coding agents. Covers workspace topology decisions, integrating with your existing platform, setting Direction across the org, governing Methods at scale, and the audit and attribution model.
Under 50 people? How to use Hamster: Startups and mid-size companies is the right starting point. Want to try Hamster on a single Brief first without the setup? See Just ship.
Running Hamster at scale
~4 minutes
Video coming soon
At scale, the first decision is workspace boundary. Hamster doesn't currently support cross-workspace nesting, so pick the boundary that matches how your Delivery org actually runs.
The three common patterns:
We recommend talking to us before choosing your workspace structure — see Get in touch at the bottom of this page.
At this scale, configure Connections at the organisation level rather than per-team where possible. Your Context Graph is what makes Blueprints, Briefs, and Methods work — and at scale, you want the graph reading consistently across your whole org, not stitched together per team.
/hamster command.See Connections overview for the full list.
At your scale, your engineers are deeply embedded with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or other coding agents. Have each engineer install the Hamster plugin so they get your Context Graph, Briefs, Blueprints, and Methods inside their existing tool. Engineers ship from their IDE, with your team's accumulated context already loaded.
We strongly recommend making this part of engineering onboarding. The IDE flow is what most of your engineers will use day-to-day, and it scales without forcing engineers into a new surface they didn't ask for.
A Cloud Agent is the configured environment Hamster runs deliveries in when nobody's hands are on a keyboard. At scale, configure one Cloud Agent per active repo per environment.
Cloud Agents complement the IDE flow rather than replacing it. They're how PMs kick off deliveries from Briefs without an engineer in the loop, how Routines run automated deliveries, and how parallel deliveries run across the team without queuing on engineer time.
Common patterns:
mobile-ios, mobile-android each get their own).Cloud Agents respect Hamster's permission model. Configuring one requires permission to manage environments, and delivering a Brief requires permission to manage documents. Owner, Admin, and Creator roles can deliver; Reviewers cannot. For sensitive environments, limit access to the roles that should configure or launch work. See Roles & permissions for the full model.
At this scale, you typically have many product surfaces. Give each one its own Blueprint, drafted from the information you share and reviewed by the team that owns the surface.
Treat Blueprints as part of your platform documentation, with owners and a review cadence. When a Brief linked to a Blueprint is marked done, Hamster can propose updates for your team to accept. Review newly authored architecture docs alongside the Blueprint and keep its content current.
For organisations with central architecture, security, or platform teams: have those teams own the cross-cutting Blueprints (security posture, infrastructure topology, compliance policies). Reference those shared Blueprints from each product team's Blueprint rather than restating them.
At enterprise scale, Direction usually runs at multiple altitudes — a company-level framework that boards and execs read against, plus team-level frameworks that product groups operate against quarter to quarter.
Common patterns:
Each Goal takes a Metric and Results per period. Where your framework supports Initiative links, an Initiative can link to more than one Goal — for example, "Mobile launch" can support both "Q3 launches" and "Mobile platform investment" without duplicating work. Frameworks are versioned and switching them doesn't disturb the Initiatives, Briefs, Plans, or Tasks below.
The Methods Library is your team's AI playbook — the Methods the AI reads from when it builds. At scale this is load-bearing: drift in your library means drift in every Delivery, multiplied by your team count.
We recommend:
A platform team typically owns the workspace's copied Methods at this scale, in the same way an internal-tooling team would own a CI configuration or a build system. Product teams contribute Methods to that central set rather than maintaining their own.
Top tip: Add an "Internal compliance and review gates" Method to your workspace early. This is where security review requirements, audit logging, and PII-handling rules live; AI agents need them in the Brief context, not pasted in by an engineer at Delivery time.
Hamster doesn't replace your engineering platform. It sits on the spec layer above it.
| Surface | Hamster | Your platform |
|---|---|---|
| Brief / spec | Hamster | — |
| Plan | Hamster | (synced) |
| Tasks | (synced) | Linear / Jira |
| Code review | — | GitHub |
| CI/CD | — | GitHub Actions / Buildkite / Jenkins |
| Delivery agent observability | Hamster | — |
| Production observability | — | Datadog / Sentry / your stack |
| Customer signal | Hamster + Slack | Gong / Zendesk / your stack |
The pattern: keep your existing platform; let Hamster own the goals, Initiatives, Briefs, Blueprints, and Methods, plus AI delivery. The Connections do the gluing. Most rollouts at this scale don't change anything in the existing platform — they add Hamster to it.
The loop — Discovery, refine, align, deliver — doesn't change at scale. What changes is the surface area each loop touches. Discovery at this scale still doesn't have to start in a Brief: spike code in a feature branch, ideate in Figma, run a Research Agent pass, hold an architecture review. Converge into a Brief when the shape is clear and alignment voters are ready.
Initiatives become the primary planning surface. Brief-level visibility doesn't scale past ~5 teams; Initiative-level does. Where your framework supports Initiative links, connect an Initiative to the Goals it supports so company- and team-level Direction stays connected to the work in flight.
The pattern at scale:
At small scale, alignment happens in the room. At scale, it happens in the activity timeline and Slack alignment unfurls. Ask the right teammates to vote Ready or Not yet before moving a Brief to Delivery.
Routines run work on a schedule or after an event. For example, you can set up a Routine to:
At scale, who triggered what and when matters. Hamster provides:
If your security or compliance team needs more (audit log exports, retention policies, the SOC 2 report), see below.
The Enterprise plan includes SSO — contact us about your requirements and see pricing. Review our SOC 2 Type II compliance and security controls, and request the report, from the Trust Center.
For procurement processes, custom DPAs, security questionnaires, or VPC-isolated deployments: email hello@tryhamster.com before procurement starts. We'll work it through case-by-case.