Teams group users together so security roles and record ownership can be managed collectively instead of per-user. There are two meaningfully different kinds, and mixing them up is a common source of confused access.

Owner teams

An owner team can own records directly, just like a user can. Security roles are assigned to the team itself, and every member inherits those roles for as long as they’re on the team. Good for a stable group that genuinely shares ownership of a set of records — a regional support team, for instance.

Access teams

An access team doesn’t own anything and has no security roles of its own. Instead, it’s a lightweight way to share a specific record (or set of records) with a flexible group of people via a predefined “access team template,” without manually sharing one by one. Often auto-created per record (e.g. automatically adding an “Opportunity Team” access team to every new Opportunity) so additional people can be added to that one record’s team as needed.

Picking the right one. Use an owner team when a group of people should have standing, role-based access to a whole category of records going forward. Use an access team when you need ad-hoc, per-record collaboration — “let these three extra people see this one Opportunity” — without creating a new security role or restructuring ownership.

Teams and business units

Every team (owner or access) belongs to a business unit, same as users, and that matters for how Business Unit-level role access evaluates records the team owns.