For Team

Projects & Priorities

Projects are how work is tracked in Laurelin. A project is anything the team is doing that has a name, a next step, and at least one person on the hook for it. This covers three tabs: Projects, Project Map, and Valinor Priorities.

What counts as a project

12 types, and you'll use them in this rough order of frequency:

Type	When to use
Deal	An active partnership or financing conversation. Bridge integration, Underdog deal.
Diligence	Specifically a diligence workstream, separate from a Deal record. Used when due diligence has its own scope.
Fund	A managed fund or vehicle (OATFI-001, BDC Dislocation Vehicle).
Product	An internal product we're building or shipping. Laurelin is a project of type Product.
Research	Research workstreams, landscape reviews, white papers.
Biz Dev	Pipeline-building work that isn't tied to one deal. Conference circuit, outbound campaigns.
Internal	Internal team initiatives — hiring, ops, process.
Legal	Legal workstreams, contract templates, structuring work.
Infrastructure	Engineering infrastructure work. Could overlap with Product; use Infrastructure for plumbing-not-features.
Automation	Sync workers, integrations, automated workflows.
Campaign	Time-bounded outbound (a launch, an announcement push).
Finance	Treasury, capital management, finance projects.
Other	Catch-all. Try to avoid.

Pick by gut. Type drives some dashboards but doesn't gate anything.

Fields that move a project

`phase` — free-text milestone label

Something like "Term sheet drafted" or "Audit in review" or "Awaiting signoff". This is the headline status — write it as if you were summarizing the project in one phrase.

`next_step`

What needs to happen next. Concrete. "Schedule call with their legal" beats "Move forward."

`blocker`

Empty if nothing's in the way. Otherwise, what's blocking — "Waiting on signed LOI from Tempo." Setting this puts the project in the blocked smart list.

`status` — active / blocked / on-hold

Orthogonal to phase. active = work is happening. blocked = we know what's wrong, can't proceed without it. on-hold = we paused this deliberately.

`health` — green / yellow / red / empty

How the project is going. Set this on the weekly status update; it mirrors back to the project record.

`importance` and `intensity` — the dot plot

Both are integers, both drive the Projects → Dashboard dot plot.

importance (1-10) — strategic weight. How much does this project matter? Bucketed for color: 1-3 (low), 4-6 (mid), 7-10 (high).
intensity (0-10) — current activity level. Is anyone touching this right now? A "high importance, low intensity" project is one to either restart or kill.

The dot plot puts intensity on Y, importance on X. Read it as: bottom-right = important and dormant; top-right = important and active; top-left = busy but doesn't matter; bottom-left = correctly ignored.

Deal-specific fields

For type Deal and sometimes Fund:

deal_type — free text. Receivables, BDC partnership, custody, etc.
deal_stage — dormant, in_market, interested, screening, IC, docs, closing, live, dead. Walks the deal-funnel.
coinvestors — free text.
deal_size_estimate — number, USD.

Project-execution fields

For internal / product / infrastructure work:

project_stage — scoping, planning, building, review, shipped, cancelled. Walks the work funnel.
strategy — long-form why-are-we-doing-this.
summary — long-form what-it-is.

You'll rarely set all of phase, deal_stage, project_stage on the same project. Pick the one or two that match the project type.

The Projects tab

Five sub-views:

Dashboard — overview, the dot plot, headline counts.
My Projects — projects where you're the manager or a member.
By Manager — grouped by who's running it.
By Type — grouped by the 12 types.
By Status — active / blocked / on-hold buckets.
Completed — project_stage = shipped or cancelled, or deal_stage = live or dead.

Click any project to drill into its detail.

The project detail view

When you open a project, you see:

Top card — name, type, phase, status, health, importance, intensity. Click to edit inline.
Overview — next step, blocker, strategy, summary, notes.
Status updates — the weekly log. See below.
Milestones — dated events on the project's timeline.
Members — people who own or watch this project. Four roles: manager, member, watcher, contact. Manager is the primary owner.
Companies — every company involved in this project. Auto-populated when you log an interaction tied to the project.
Contacts — external people on this project (synced from related interactions).
Key dates — upcoming dates. Same shape as company key dates.
Links — data-room, memo, legal, model, presentation, other URLs. Tracked with source (notion / sharepoint / google-drive / other) and link_status (working / final).
Sub-projects — projects with this project as their parent. Useful for deal → workstreams hierarchies.

Weekly status updates

Filed per project, per week. Open a project → "Status update" tab → write the body, set health, click submit. The status update mirrors the health value back to the project record.

Two shortcuts:

"Same as last week" — sets no_change = 1, no body required. Use this when nothing happened.
Reuse last week's — drafts off the most recent update so you only edit the diff.

Only one status update per project per week (UNIQUE(project_id, week_of) in the schema). Submitting a second time replaces the first.

If you're a project manager, expect a friendly "you have N projects without a status update this week" nudge each Monday.

Project Map

The Project Map tab is a flow diagram of how Laurelin processes data: Sources (Outlook, Slack, Telegram, Notion) → Engine (auto-router, signature parser, lost-thread detector) → Entities (companies, people, projects) → Surfaces (the tabs you're reading about). It's reference material, not a workspace.

You'll open it when:

You're debugging why an email didn't reach Laurelin and want to see the pipeline.
You're onboarding a new engineer and want a visual.

Valinor Priorities (focus)

The Priorities tab is the team-level view: what are we prioritising this period? It's a curated subset of projects ordered by strategic importance. Used in weekly team meetings and quarterly planning.

You don't edit priorities in the Projects tab — there's a dedicated UI in the Priorities tab for ranking and rolling forward.

Common workflows

"Start a new deal"

Projects tab → Add Project.
Type: Deal. Name: <Company> <Description> (e.g., Bridge Stripe Integration).
Add the company under "Companies."
Set phase to whatever you've actually got — "First call scheduled" works.
Set deal_stage = screening.
Add yourself as manager and any teammates as members.

"File this week's status"

Open the project.
Status update tab.
Type one or two sentences. Pick health.
Submit.

Less than a minute per project. If it's taking longer, you're writing too much — status updates are signals, not memos.

"This deal is dead"

Set deal_stage = dead (or cancelled for non-deals). It drops out of active views. Don't delete the project — the history is valuable.

"Sub-project a chunk of work"

Open the parent project. Add a new project with the parent set. Use this for "Deal X → Diligence" or "Product Y → Backend buildout."