How I AII built a Claude Cowork system that does a week of PM work in a day
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
A self-improving Claude Cowork system that compresses PM weeks into days
- Daniel Blum describes building a Claude + Cowork “PM operating system” that automates coordination overhead (Slack/email/tasks/meetings) so he can do a week of PM work in a day.
- His setup uses a Notion board as a lightweight, human-readable source of truth while Cowork populates and manages it from integrated inputs like calendar, Slack, email, and meeting transcripts.
- Two recurring automations—Weekly Prep and a Morning Brief—keep priorities current, extract action items, and proactively identify unknown internal terms to be defined and saved into context.
- A structured self-improvement loop reviews what Daniel changed from Claude’s drafts, detects repeatable behaviors to convert into skills, and aggregates friction telemetry to continuously refine the system.
- To scale across Melio, the team built a “Workstation” plugin with strong onboarding UX that connects tools, captures voice and goals, and standardizes a high-leverage starting point for any employee.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasPowerful AI systems need two ingredients: self-rewrite + deep integrations.
Daniel argues that the leap in usefulness comes when the system can (1) edit its own “core files”/skills so it gets better without constant manual rebuilding, and (2) connect broadly to your real work surfaces (Slack, email, calendar, meeting transcripts, docs, etc.). Without these, you get isolated prompts instead of an operating system for work.
Use Notion as a mostly read-only control panel; let the agent do the upkeep.
Cowork built Daniel a simple three-lane Notion board (Top of mind / This week / Inbox) and then keeps it updated from his ecosystem; Daniel mostly reads it while Claude does the maintenance. The key is separating a human-friendly “source of truth” view from the agent’s behind-the-scenes work of keeping it current.
Anchor the week with an automated weekly prep that reconciles plans with reality.
The weekly prep automation runs (Sunday) to synthesize priorities from Notion, calendar, Slack, and meeting transcripts, propose what to add/remove/move, and prompt meeting-prep decisions. Daniel’s point is that PM planning breaks when reality diverges mid-week—so the system must continuously reconcile planned work with incoming chaos.
Make the daily brief a context-maintenance tool, not just a summary.
The morning brief summarizes yesterday’s meetings (via Granola transcripts), extracts action items, and—crucially—flags unknown internal terms/milestones/files found in Slack/email/notes. Daniel then defines them once and saves them to context, turning “company-specific language” into durable shared memory.
Expect slow starts; the compounding ROI comes after you centralize work and context.
Early ROI feels negative because the system doesn’t know your “business logic,” so you distrust outputs and double-check. Daniel claims the payoff compounds once you push through a few weeks of ruthless context-feeding and routing more work through the system so it can observe patterns and reduce friction.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI cannot describe how powerful it is. I'm really able to do in a day now what used to take me a week.
— Daniel Blum
The real importance is for a system to, A, be able to rewrite its own, uh, core files, and that means that it keeps on improving, and B, just have connections and integrations to as much of your ecosystem.
— Daniel Blum
My goal is to have, uh, Notion as, as something I only look at and Claude manages on my behalf.
— Daniel Blum
In this daily brief, my Cowork runs through my recent Slacks, my emails, my Granola notes, and it looks for context that it doesn't understand in these things and it says like, "Oh, if there's a file I wasn't aware of, there's a milestone, there's a goal," it would ask me about it and say, "Hey, like, what is this? Is this important? Should I read this?" And this is, I think, where the real magic happens.
— Daniel Blum
I don't get road rage, but I get Claude rage.
— Daniel Blum
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
