TeamHub · Seat Relationships

Overview

TeamHub is LinkedIn's internal app for sales teams to manage their roster, account assignments, and rep crediting. Part of managing a roster is mapping the relationships between reps and their partner teams, called seat relationships. A Sales Development Rep, for example, might support several Account Executives. Getting those relationships right keeps reps working the same book of business, which lifts selling productivity and keeps account-team data in one place.

The problem

Today these relationships are maintained by a mix of users, Sales Managers, and Sales Operations, and the workflow has three cracks that quietly push the data offline, the one thing TeamHub is built to prevent.

"What also would be great is if I can add new AEs to SDs. It'd be a lot easier if I can do it instead of having ops do it for me."

Sales Development Manager

Manager access: only Ops can view or act on seat relationships inside TeamHub, so managers end up running their mappings offline in spreadsheets.
Manual workflows: mapping a rep doesn't actually share their book of business, so Ops has to sync accounts by hand through slow, manual steps.
User awareness: reps aren't told about roster changes or new mappings as they happen, so the people affected are the last to know.

Process

We started from a simple belief: the relationships that shape how a team sells shouldn't be stuck in a manager's private spreadsheet. They belong in TeamHub, where everyone can see and trust them.

Research & framing

We dug into how managers and Ops actually maintain these relationships today, and traced exactly where the work fell off-platform. That made the fix clear: the people who own these relationships needed to manage them where the data already lives.

Explorations

We explored a few ways to make these relationships easy for managers to read and edit, from a card-based roster to a grouped, filterable table.

TeamHub Seat Relationships explored as cards: each Sales Development rep beside the Account Executives they support, with unmapped reps to assign.

TeamHub Mappings explored as a grouped, filterable table organized by Sales Development rep, with account counts.

Key decision

We brought seat relationships fully into TeamHub for the people who own them: managers can map and adjust relationships directly, mapping a rep automatically shares the right book of business, and changes surface to the reps they affect.

Solution

Three ideas carried the design:

01

Managers, not just Ops

Mapping management opens up to Sales Managers directly in TeamHub, so they can view and adjust seat relationships instead of running them offline.

02

Map once, share automatically

Mapping a rep to a partner team shares the book of business with them, replacing the manual account syncing Ops used to do by hand.

03

Changes people can see

Roster changes and new mappings surface across the experience, so reps know who they support and which accounts they cover.

Mapping reps to their partner teams in TeamHub, where managers can build and edit seat relationships directly.

Impact

Self-service managers manage their own team and mappings directly in TeamHub, no longer waiting on Sales Operations

~7 min to reconcile accounts for a single mapping automatically, replacing hours of manual uploads

Built to scale the same foundation extends to other audiences that rely on mappings

Reflection

The real win was pulling this work out of spreadsheets and back into TeamHub. Every relationship managed offline was a chance for the roster to drift out of sync. Giving the managers who own these mappings a place to manage them directly keeps the data accurate for everyone who relies on it.