Design: Cross-Squad Orchestration — coordinating work across multiple Squad instances #316

Cross-Squad Orchestration: Coordinating Work Across Multiple Squad Instances

Problem

Currently, Squad assumes it's running as a single team. We support:

• Upstream squad for organizational knowledge
• Subsquad as another instance of the same squad

But we don't support different squads working together as peers. If a task is given to one squad, it can't reach out to another squad, enter its context, and continue work leveraging that squad's decisions, personnel, configuration, and domain knowledge.

Use Case

Imagine two squads:

• Squad A — owns infrastructure and platform tooling
• Squad B — owns an application built on that platform

When Squad B needs platform changes, it should be able to:

1. Discover Squad A exists and owns that domain
2. Enter Squad A's context (read its decisions.md, team.md, routing rules)
3. Create/assign work within Squad A's workflow
4. Track progress and get results back in Squad B's context

Design Considerations

1. Discovery — How do squads find each other? Registry? Convention-based (e.g., well-known repo paths)?
2. Context sharing — What context transfers between squads? Decisions, team roster, skills, MCP/plugin configs?
3. Authentication — How does Squad A trust requests from Squad B? Impersonation vs. delegation?
4. Work handoff — GitHub issues across repos? Cross-repo PRs? Shared project boards?
5. Feedback loop — How does Squad B know when Squad A completed the work?

Possible Approaches

Option A: Federated Squads
Each squad exposes a manifest (like team.md + capabilities). Squads can query each other's manifests and create work items in each other's repos.

Option B: Hub-and-Spoke
An "org-level" squad coordinates between team-level squads. All cross-squad communication goes through the hub.

Option C: MCP/Skills/Plugins Bridge
Each squad registers as an MCP server, skill, or plugin that other squads can invoke. Cross-squad work is just another tool call.

Related

• Issue Please Don't Lock squad into using GitHub #8 — Provider abstraction discussion (prompt-level vs. code-level)
• Issue Question: what's the intended role of the platform/communication adapter layer? #294 — Platform/communication adapter layer question
• Existing upstream/subsquad support in squad config

Request

Design and propose an architecture for cross-squad orchestration. Consider how this interacts with the existing MCP/skills/plugins extensibility model and the "bring your own platform" philosophy.