Small teams, smaller machinery
A five-person team does not need enterprise ceremony — it needs the boring basics done right: one account, shared devices, shared budgets, and an audit trail that says who did what. The three-role model is plenty.
The setup that fits
- One owner account; everyone else joins as a named member.
- One or two always-on devices, claimed through the fleet view.
- A central baseline from the policy guide — do not per-device configure anything on day one.
- Keys in the vault, never in a shared chat.
The mistakes to skip
- Shared logins — they make the audit trail fiction.
- No spend alerts — a small team feels a surprise invoice more than a big one.
- Everyone as admin — permissions exist so mistakes are small, not so you can feel trusted.
- Automating before measuring — run tasks by hand for two weeks, then automate the ones you understand with cron.
Grow without redoing it
The small setup scales because it is already the big setup minus the ceremony: named accounts, one policy, one audit stream. When the team grows, you add devices and roles — you do not rebuild. See fleet management for the full version.