---
title: "Members & roles"
description: "How people join your Firefight workspace, and how incident roles like Incident Lead work."
canonical: https://firefight.app/docs/customization/members-and-roles/
---

# Members & roles

Firefight distinguishes two kinds of "role". Workspace roles describe what a person can do in Firefight itself. Incident roles describe the hat someone wears during a specific incident, like Incident Lead. This page covers both.

## How people become members

There is no invite flow to manage. Anyone in your Slack workspace who uses Firefight becomes a member automatically. Running a `/ff` command, being picked as incident lead, or signing in to the web dashboard with Slack is enough. Firefight creates the membership on the spot using the person's Slack profile.

The first person to connect the workspace becomes its owner. Everyone after that joins as a regular member.

## The members list

**Settings → Members** shows everyone in your workspace. For each person you see their name, email, and avatar from Slack, their workspace role, and when they joined.

| Workspace role | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| Owner | The person who first connected the workspace |
| Admin | Elevated access to workspace administration |
| Member | Everyone else who uses Firefight |

## Incident roles

Incident roles are assigned per incident and answer the question "who is doing what right now". Firefight ships one built-in role:

| Role | Description |
| --- | --- |
| Incident Lead | Coordinates incident response and makes decisions |

The Incident Lead role is marked as a System role in settings. It is always enabled and cannot be turned off, because incident lists, the incident page, and Slack announcements all surface who the lead is.

## Defining custom roles

**Settings → Roles** lists every incident role. Click **Add Role** to define your own, for example Operations Lead or Communications Lead, with a name and a description of what the role is responsible for.

Custom roles can be disabled when you no longer want them offered, and re-enabled later. A role that has been used on incidents cannot be deleted, since that would erase history. Disable it instead. A role that has never been assigned can be deleted outright.

## Assigning the lead during an incident

In the incident channel, run:

```
/ff lead
```

A **Set Incident Lead** dialog opens where you pick a person from your Slack workspace. If the person has never used Firefight before, that is fine. Selecting them makes them a member automatically. Each incident has one lead at a time, and picking someone new simply replaces the previous assignment.

The lead appears on the incident page and in incident lists across the [web dashboard](https://firefight.app/docs/incidents/concepts.md), so anyone catching up can see who is coordinating at a glance.

:::note
Assign a lead early, even for small incidents. A named coordinator is the single highest-leverage habit in incident response, and it also gives AI-generated [postmortems](https://firefight.app/docs/postmortems/overview.md) a clear account of who was driving.
:::