§ 01 · What we builtA morning routine that runs itself.
Every weekday at 7:02am, before I open my laptop, my Notion daily page is already populated with last night's Linear comments, the PRs assigned to me, and a digest of every Slack thread I missed in #engineering.
The full system is a chain of about a dozen Make scenarios triggered either by time or by Raycast hotkey. The PM-OS replaces the first ninety minutes of my old workday — the part where I used to read everything, write a triage list, and pretend I was "planning."
§ 02 · Problem being solvedThe job is mostly reading and ranking.
Product management at a mid-size company is, optimistically, 70% reading and 30% writing. The reading part — Linear, GitHub, Slack, Notion — is mechanical: skim, decide if it matters, file it. It doesn't require judgment until the very last step. So why was I doing it by hand?
I wanted to spend my mornings on the 30% that actually requires me — the writing, the synthesis, the conversations — and let software handle the reading.
§ 03 · What was the hardest partGetting the summaries to not be useless.
The first version of the digest was a wall of bullet points that took longer to read than the source material. I rewrote the ChatGPT prompt seventeen times. The thing that finally worked: telling it to write like a PM writing for themselves — five sentences max, no headers, name the people involved, end with the one decision required from me today.
§ 04 · What went wrongThe Linear API silently truncated long descriptions.
§ 05 · What you learnedThe bottleneck isn't the tools. It's the prompt.
One: the API call is the easy part. The prompt is the hard part. Treat your automation prompts like production code — version them, comment them, test them with edge cases.
Two: never trust a summary you can't verify in one click. Every line in my digest links back to the source. If it looks wrong, I can check in two seconds.
Three: the best automations replace the reading, not the deciding. The minute you let the LLM make a call for you, things go sideways.