The problem
An edtech company normally carries sales, customer success, marketing, support, product, engineering and finance as departments. I had to carry them as roles, alone, alongside a full-time job and a family, without letting any of them send, spend or delete on my behalf.
What I built
A front-door agent takes everything I say and turns it into routed tasks. Behind it sit single-purpose specialists for radar, outreach, meeting preparation, debriefs, records, support, product, content, data quality and finance. Each has a written job and a list of anti-jobs.
The interesting mechanisms are the ones between the agents. Shared rules live in memory every agent reads. Ownership is explicit, so two agents cannot both claim a task. Checking is independent: a fact-check gate in front of content, a claims gate on every draft that fails on counts, retired names and unsourced figures, a "no proof, no done" rule on engineering. Completion needs evidence. And decisions come to me on a board, one at a time, with the context and a recommendation.
What you can see
Three concrete pieces of the system are written up as their own notes: Support Pulse, where product signals prompt a follow-up; the Raspberry Pi watchdog, where a site outage reaches my phone through the same workflow; and Funding Scout, where a maintenance agent proposes changes a person reviews. Icebox is the shared idea backlog that stops every agent inventing its own task list.
The result
Work moving without a rota. Prep before every call. A pipeline from first contact to renewal with one person at the decision points. Rules as gates instead of reminders.
When the team grew past forty, I restructured it: one written job each, a shared handbook, and decisions brought to me one at a time. How the restructure went.