In this guide, I will walk you through exactly how to add team members in Azure DevOps, and how I manage team additions—from the high-level organization settings down to granular team permissions.
How to add team members in Azure DevOps
Managing Azure DevOps effectively means understanding the hierarchy. You aren’t just “adding an email”; you are assigning a License (Access Level) and a Permission Set (Security Group).
Prerequisites:
Before we start, you need to ensure you have the right permissions to actually add people.
- Organization Level: To add users to the organization, you must be a member of the Project Collection Administrators group or be the Organization Owner.
- Project Level: To add users to a specific project team, you should be a Project Administrator or a Team Administrator.
If you’re sitting there looking at a greyed-out “Add” button, check your own profile settings first!
Understanding Azure DevOps Access Levels
| Access Level | Who is it for? | Cost (Typical) | Key Features |
| Basic | Developers, Designers, PMs | First 5 free, then ~$6/mo | Boards, Repos, Pipelines, Artifacts |
| Stakeholder | Clients, Executive Sponsors | Free (Unlimited) | View Boards, Add/Edit Work Items |
| Basic + Test Plans | QA Engineers, SDETs | ~$52/mo | Everything in Basic + Manual Testing tools |
| Visual Studio Subscriber | Developers with MSDN | Included in Subscription | Automatically detected based on login |
Step 1: Adding a User to the Organization
I always recommend adding users at the organization level first. This makes them “available” to be picked for any project within your company.
The Walkthrough:
- Log in to your Azure DevOps organization (e.g.,
dev.azure.com/YourCompany). - In the bottom-left corner, click on Organization Settings.
- Under the General section, click on Users.
- Click the blue Add users button at the top right.
- Enter Information: * Users: Type in the email (e.g.,
chloe.baker@yourcompany.com).- Access Level: For a developer, I’ll choose Basic.
- Add to Projects: Select the specific project they’ll be working on.
- Azure DevOps Groups: By default, I usually add them to [Project Name]\Contributors.
- Click Add. Check out the screenshots below for your reference.
