Assigning Project Roles and Using Tags
An overview of the standard roles (PM, BA, DEV, AI Engineer, SALE) and how to use tags to classify the nature of work in a project.
Administrator
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02/05/2026
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1. Why assign roles?
A project usually involves people with very different skills. Standardized roles help you:
- Assign work correctly (give a design task to a DEV, not a BA).
- Run reports by role (e.g., total AI Engineer hours this month).
- Standardize references across projects.
2. Five standard roles
| Role | Primary responsibility |
|---|---|
| PM | Project manager — owns overall schedule, budget, and quality. |
| BA | Business analyst — discovery, requirements documentation (FSD, User Guide). |
| DEV | Software developer — coding, bug fixes, system integration. |
| AI Engineer | Builds AI solutions — RAG, OCR, chatbots, STT/TTS. |
| SALE | Sales / customer success — bridges the deal as it moves into delivery. |
3. Project tagging system
Tags help filter and group projects by nature:
- Dev, Fix Bugs, Design — Engineering work types.
- Planning, Review, Final — Review phases.
- PoC (Proof of Concept) — Experimental projects, not production.
- Marketing, Inventory, Common, Present, BA — Other categories.
4. Practical conventions
- A project should have at least one PM before moving to "In Progress".
- The PoC tag really matters — it cleanly separates experiments from production work in revenue reports.
- Avoid tags that mean the same thing (e.g., "Bug" and "Fix Bugs") — keep one canonical tag set system-wide.
5. Tips on tagging effectively
Each project should carry 2–4 tags:
- 1 tag for nature of work (Dev, Marketing, BA…).
- 1 tag for phase (Planning, Final…) where applicable.
- 1 special tag like PoC if relevant.
Too many tags dilute the signal.