Editorial Production Tracker

The problem this kills

A blog post is "almost done." But what does that mean? Is it sitting in the editor's queue, or did the editor finish and it's waiting on design? Did the designer ever actually pick it up, or did the handoff happen in a Slack message that scrolled away three days ago? Is the social copy approved? Why did the launch piece miss its date - and who was holding it when it slipped?

In most content teams the "pipeline" is a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember, plus a tangle of Slack threads, comments in a doc, and a calendar that's already wrong. Pieces stall between people because nobody is sure it's their turn. Handoffs vanish. Overdue items only get noticed when a stakeholder asks where their thing is. And things get published before the final sign-off - or sit finished for a week because nobody flipped the switch.

This tool replaces the guesswork with a clear board where every piece has exactly one card, every stage handoff has to be accepted by the person receiving it, overdue items raise their hand on their own, and nothing goes live until an approver says yes.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Lets you create content items or import them from a CSV (title, format, owner, current stage, due date, asset links).
• Moves each piece through your real stages - whatever you call them: idea, outline, draft, edit, design, approval, scheduled, published.
• Requires the receiving owner to accept the handoff at each stage transition - so a piece only moves to "edit" when the editor actually accepts it, not when someone hopes they will.
• Flags overdue items automatically when a piece sits in a stage longer than that stage's SLA (the number of days it's allowed to take), and emails reminders.
• Enforces a final publish approval: the last stage needs an approver's explicit sign-off before the status flips to published and gets a timestamp.
• Keeps one workflow card per piece with a duplicate guard, so the same content ID or title can't spawn two cards.
• Exports a clean content-status CSV in the columns your own systems (or your editorial calendar) expect.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks what your real stages are called, the SLA for each one, who owns each stage, how handoffs happen today, the exact fields and naming in your content data, your typical and peak volumes, and your messy edge cases (a piece kicked back from edit to draft, a rush job that skips stages, a freelancer who doesn't have a login). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a board shaped to your editorial workflow, not a generic kanban template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into your stages, SLAs, and data model.
• The full build: database, login, create/import with duplicate guards, the stage-by-stage workflow with accept-handoff gates, overdue flagging, the email notifications and reminders.
• The hard human gate: the final publish sign-off no one can skip.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to any other system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy board. The plan builds in the controls a content operation actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch the pipeline.
• Row-level security so people only see the content that belongs to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every create, move, accept, kickback, reminder, approval, and publish is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the app moves and reminds, but a person must accept each handoff, and an approver must sign off before anything is marked published. Nothing auto-publishes.
• Duplicate guards so one piece always has exactly one workflow card.

Who it's for

Content managers, managing editors, and marketing ops coordinators who are juggling writers, editors, and designers across a pipeline that currently lives in a spreadsheet and a dozen Slack threads - and who want a real, accountable production board without hiring a developer or paying for a heavyweight content-ops platform. You don't need to write code. You need your stages, your SLAs, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.