Papuass - I agree that the teams function on the website is not terribly useful yet. There was a recent post about this started here: Public / Private / Team Private Feature Request - #2 by hammerkill
Nate himself chimed in on the thread and indicated that the team function is going to receive an overhaul, but that completion of this overhaul is not scheduled soon. Since this is a web function and not an app function, it may be developed/administered by a different team than the app, I have no idea. The benefit of that, I imagine, is that it shouldn’t require an app update to be pushed out to all users in order to achieve the improvements.
You ask about ideas to make it more useful, and to me, the number one useful “team” function relates to the monitoring of team member workouts. Experienced TR users have a lot to share with those new to it, and especially to those new to structured training but who haven’t got a paid coach. Shared experiences of users leads to more successful implementations of TR and more successfully completed workouts. At present, in order to functionally monitor these workouts, without a working team sharing function, a user has to search through oodles of workouts performed in the relevant time range (itself a problem due to time zone differences,) and try to find their team member’s workout among them, assuming that they’ve told you the exact workout name and that they’ve made their workout data public. The situation is clunky at best, and failure in these search efforts is common. Aside from functionality, there are some reasons that TR users may not want their workouts to be globally public to all users. The resolution to the low functionality of the team function should also accommodate this preference.
My team members have noted my performance improvements while using TR, and have been adding indoor training with TR to their regimens, and it is they who sought out the team function to connect with what I’ve been doing. I think that is a small indication of avenues of potential user growth for TR, and as mentioned I think it leads to more successful implementations and workout completions. We’ll see if the TR team agrees and develops this team function.