Choosing a collaborator group structure

The structure on a collaborator group controls how a cascade reads the group. The right pick follows the shape of the people in the group. Some groups have no shape at all, just a set of members. Some run in a single line, one position after another. Some branch into a tree. Match the structure to the shape your collaborators are already in and the cascade will read it the way you expect.

Start at the simplest end of that spectrum. When the collaborators in a group have no order and no hierarchy, flat is the structure you want. Members sit in a plain unordered list, and the cascade calcs disappear from the picker because there are no layers to walk. Flat is the default and the right choice for most programs, where you only need to know who belongs to the group rather than how they rank against each other. Pair it with a fixed calc and every member earns the same amount when they trigger an engagement.

Add order to that group and you move to the next shape along the spectrum. A linear chain arranges collaborators into an ordered sequence where each position has at most one upline and one downline, so it fits a ranked sales team or a reporting line where each person sits under one manager, person A above B, B above C, and so on. When someone triggers an engagement, the cascade walks up or down the chain one position at a time and credits each layer at the rate you have configured. A linear chain requires Siren Pro.

Let that single line branch and you reach the most structured shape. A parent-child group is a tree where one parent can have many children and each child can have children of its own, which is what an org chart or a brokerage looks like once a manager owns several teams that each have their own lead. The cascade walks the tree outward from the triggering collaborator, upline toward the root and downline toward the leaves, crediting each layer along the way. Like the linear chain, parent-child requires Siren Pro.

Changing a group’s structure later

You can switch an existing group’s structure at any time, and its members carry over. The structural metadata that orders those members does not. Switching to linear chain leaves every member without a position, which the resolver reads as position 0 (topmost), so the chain has no real order until you set positions again. Switching to parent-child leaves every member without a parent. Switching back to flat is harmless because flat ignores per-member metadata entirely.

After any structure change, re-establish the positions or parent relationships the new structure needs before you rely on a cascade. For step-by-step guidance on converting a tiered program-group setup into a single program bound to a cascade, see migrate a tiered program group to a cascade. For moving an existing install onto the Plus and Pro tiers that collaborator groups and cascades require, see upgrading to Plus and Pro.