What is the one rule in every pattern?
The one rule is that a Digital FTE always has one named manager. It is a direct report in the workspace: someone reads its morning brief, approves its proposals, sets its targets, decides its autonomy, and reviews its performance. An FTE with no named manager is an FTE nobody approves for, and it will sit idle at Level 0 or, worse, be promoted by whoever is in a hurry.
Every pattern below is a way of choosing that manager. The organization's wallet, credentials, and audit trail are shared across all of them; the management relationship is what differs.
When does one FTE per function work?
One FTE per function, reporting to that function's lead, works for established teams that already have a finance lead, a support lead, a marketing lead, and so on. The Finance Controller FTE reports to the finance lead, who approves its reconciliation proposals and reviews its close; the Support FTE reports to the support lead. Each manager knows the function and can judge the proposals fast.
The cost is that each lead learns to manage a Digital FTE separately, and standards can drift between functions. A short shared playbook on remit, gate, ladder, and review, such as the delegation framework on ftes.ai, keeps them aligned.
When does a pod under one manager work?
A pod of several Digital FTEs under one operations manager works for small companies that have no functional leads: a founder or operations lead manages the Search Visibility FTE, the SDR FTE, and the Finance Controller FTE together, reading one combined morning brief and approving across functions. It concentrates the management skill in one person and keeps standards consistent.
The cost is that one person's approval time is the bottleneck, and they may not know each function deeply. Mitigate by promoting routine classes on the ladder early where the record supports it, and by routing specialist categories, such as accounting adjustments, to the outside accountant for approval.
- Per function: established teams with functional leads
- Pod: small companies with one operations manager
- Apprentice: teams developing juniors into managers
When does the apprentice pattern work?
The apprentice pattern pairs a Digital FTE with a junior team member who reviews its proposals under a senior's supervision, learns the standard from the senior's approvals and send-backs, and grows into the FTE's manager. It works for teams that want to develop people and that have a senior with time to supervise.
It turns the FTE into a training instrument. Reviewing a hundred reconciliation proposals with the evidence attached teaches a junior what a match looks like faster than doing a hundred by hand, and managing a direct report, even a digital one, is real management experience.
How do the patterns evolve?
The patterns evolve as the company grows. A pod under one manager splits into per-function FTEs as functional leads are hired, with each lead inheriting an FTE whose remit, memory, and record already exist. An apprentice becomes a manager and takes the FTE with them. The audit trail and Brand Brain persist through every change, so the handover is a change of approver rather than a restart.
Whatever the pattern, the FTE's workspace shows who its manager is, and the audit trail shows who approved what. Changing the manager is a permissioned action, logged like every other. The team structure can change as often as the company does without the FTE losing its history.
What does a change of manager look like in the workspace?
A change of manager is a permissioned action by an owner or admin in the Digital FTE's settings, logged in the audit trail with the previous and new manager and the date. From that moment the morning brief reports to the new manager, approvals in the categories routed to the manager reach them, and the workforce view shows the new name. Nothing about the FTE restarts: its remit, targets, Brand Brain, connections, and audit trail are all as they were, and the new manager reads the previous manager's decisions in the record.
The one thing that should change is trust. A new manager has not seen the approval record that justified any promoted class, so the sensible default is to step promoted classes back to gated and let them re-earn autonomy under the new manager's own approvals, which the ladder makes a one-click, logged change per class. The handover therefore costs the new manager a few weeks of higher approval time and gives them a record of their own, which is a better foundation than inheriting someone else's trust. The FTE's monthly report for the handover month says what it delivered and what remained open, so the new manager starts from a written state.