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Example: Project Dashboard

Author/Source: Chris Blattman, claudeblattman.com

Key Ideas

  • This is a synthetic but realistic example of what the /weekly-review skill produces over time: a full project dashboard and meeting log for a fictional RCT ("Nairobi Digital Futures" -- a digital financial literacy program for women market vendors in Kenya).
  • The dashboard is organized around a strategic objective (north star), strategic priorities, critical success factors (with color-coded status), current project state, cohort status, key metrics, timeline, and per-person task assignments.
  • Meeting summaries are detailed and structured: organized by agenda topic, with explicit decisions, action items by person, and notes on open questions -- all generated from Granola transcripts by Claude Code.
  • The dashboard prioritizes strategic orientation first, then operational details, then individual tasks -- answering "what matters" before "what happened."
  • Critical success factors include subjective assessments (GREEN/YELLOW status) with owner attribution and narrative notes, not just numerical metrics.

Summary

This article presents a full synthetic example of the project overview and meeting log that the /weekly-review skill generates for a research project. The fictional project is a cluster RCT studying a digital financial literacy and mobile savings program for women market vendors in Nairobi, with a research team spanning Georgetown, the University of Nairobi, and IPA Kenya. The example demonstrates the level of detail and structure that accumulates over weeks of running the review skill.

The dashboard opens with the strategic objective, then moves through strategic priorities, critical success factors (each with a color-coded status, owner, and narrative note), a prose summary of where the project stands, cohort status tables, key metrics, a timeline of upcoming milestones, per-person task assignments, key challenges, funding pipeline status, partner/stakeholder status, decisions made this week, and short-term tasks. Below the dashboard, detailed meeting summaries show how the weekly review synthesizes information from Granola transcripts -- covering agenda topics like training fidelity, screening progress, midline survey design, and partner coordination, with explicit decisions and action items attributed to specific team members.

Relevance to Economics Research

This example is directly modeled on the kind of project an empirical economist would run: a multi-site RCT with treatment and control arms, cluster randomization, staggered rollout, and a distributed research team. The dashboard structure -- strategic objectives, critical success factors, per-person tasks, funding pipeline -- maps onto the real management needs of a field experiment. The meeting summary format (decisions, action items by person, open questions) addresses the chronic problem of institutional memory loss in long-running research projects. This is a concrete template that any research team could adapt.