Every real team you've ever been part of had people on it, not job descriptions. A backend engineer who wouldn't go near a component file. A reviewer who read every diff like it was the first time, not the fifth. The team worked because of who was on it, not just what the org chart said everyone did.
That's worth imagining before anything else. Not "how do I automate a feature" — who would you actually want running point, if you could build the team from nothing. A Product Lead who's ruthless about sequencing. A Backend Engineer who stays in their lane. A Polish Engineer who only shows up once the first two are already merged. A Reviewer who's a little paranoid, on purpose.
df_code's Conductor pattern already proves the smallest version of this works: teach one Feature Engineer to build, one Product Designer to check the work against the bigger picture, and a Conductor to hold the sequence together without ever opening a file itself. Want more than one feature moving at once? The same idea just needs one more layer — a Product Lead watching over several Engineer/Designer pairs, deciding what each one picks up next.
None of that team is waiting for you inside the app. There's no roster to choose from — you write who's on it. Give the Product Lead a personality worth trusting. Give each Engineer a lane they won't cross. That's not extra setup bolted onto the feature — that's the feature. The team is only ever as real as the people you imagine into it.
Once you've written a cast you like, save it as a Strategy instead of rebuilding it from scratch for the next repo — the pattern already knows how to reuse itself, it just hadn't been asked to hold a team this size before.
Q: How is a Product Lead different from a Conductor? A: A Conductor keeps one sequence moving — one Feature Engineer, one Reviewer or Designer, one thread of work. A Product Lead sits a level above several such pairs at once, deciding what each one picks up and how their output relates, without ever touching a file itself.
Q: Does df_code ship a default Product Lead persona? A: No — there's no preset roster. You write each role's prompt yourself, the same as any other Agent you assign to a workspace, which means the personality and priorities of the whole team are entirely your call.
Q: Do I need a Product Lead if I'm only running one feature at a time? A: No — a single Engineer/Designer pair with its own Conductor is still the right shape for one pipeline. The Product Lead earns its place once you're running more than one pipeline in parallel and something needs to decide between them.
Q: Is a Product Lead a new primitive, or the existing pattern reused? A: The existing pattern, reused. The same sibling-role referencing and workspace-scope choices a Strategy already makes for an Engineer/Designer pair apply unchanged one layer up, for a Product Lead overseeing several of those pairs.