Operational Intelligence With ICM: 4 Real Use Cases

It took me probably two months of reading through the community and using the resources available before this actually clicked. What did it for me was a post Curtis Hayes wrote a few months back, called "the folder system became my agency." Reading that is what helped me understand how this actually works, and I'm hoping this post can do the same for someone else.

How I wrapped my head around this

I lead development teams, and I also do what I'd call typical project or product management work. So a lot of how I thought about this started with a simple question: what are the most common things I produce or share, at a daily, weekly, or even monthly level? I wrote those things down. From there I asked how they actually get created, where they start, what the process of drafting or iteration looks like, and where they end up.

About 50% of my day is spent on the phone, and most new ideas, action items, and questions come out of those calls. Sometimes it's email, but most of the time it's calls. Before, I'd use AI to help draft or compile something, but I was feeding it context manually every time. What I realized was that I needed a way to take the information from those calls and actually store it, so I could recall it and use it again for whatever needed to happen next.

Here are 4 use cases for how I use the ICM framework. The first two are functional, I use them every day. The last two are ideas I think this goes toward, not things I've fully built yet.

1. Meeting intake

I try to record as much as I can, using the existing recording features on Teams or Zoom when I can, because the raw transcript is the most valuable thing to me. When a call isn't on one of those platforms, I use the voice memo app on my iPhone.

I have a shortcut on my iPhone. I click a button, and it creates an email with a specific subject line tracking system. That's how Claude knows to go find these transcripts in my inbox. I put the transcript in the body of the email and send it to myself. My Gmail is the front door into the whole system.

From there I have a skill, agent instructions, that I still trigger manually. I tell it to go process all the email transcripts in my inbox. It knows not to touch the ones it's already processed. It takes the raw transcripts and runs them through the same structure every time, and decides which project folder the summary belongs in. If it's not obvious where something goes, it asks me. That's the human in the loop part.

2. Product management

Once something lands in the right folder, that's where the product management use case picks up. Call logs go into a captures folder, with subfolders for where the capture came from: user calls, stakeholder input, internal team meetings.

Because the folder already knows the context of the product, I gave it that context once and it's kept building on it for months now, I can go in and work on stakeholder updates, user stories, mockups, or outreach copy using Claude Code as the interface.

I have weekly check-ins with our core team, and a skill that gives me a prep update before each one: what shipped, what's being discussed, what's still open. About every six weeks I also draft a larger stakeholder update the same way. It's not final by any means, but the system stays up to date, and I'm using it to brainstorm and track things as I go, not starting from a blank page.

Day to day, the upside is I don't have to remember where everything is anymore. The downside is I don't remember things as well as I used to. That's a real shift in how I operate, and I'm still figuring out the balance between what I hand off to the system and what I keep for myself.

Overall it's been a real change. I feel like I could take on two or three more projects because of this system, and I spend more time on the creative and outreach work, and less time drafting a report I didn't enjoy putting together anyway.

3. Where I think this goes, part one

Use cases three and four are more aspirational. Not something fully built yet, just how I think this could apply.

I work in the AEC industry, on large capital programs. The idea is the same as what I built for product management: if teams and specialists update the system of record we already keep, calls, meeting minutes, agendas, submittals, into a subfolder across the whole project, the model could build a log the same way it does with call notes now. At a project manager level, you could see quickly what the status of something is, or when something was last submitted.

4. Where I think this goes, part two

Use case four is the culmination of all of this. If multiple products or projects used the same kind of folder pattern, you could run queries across all of them, insights, updates, problems. The opportunity is real, but only if people actually keep these systems up to date. That's the key behavior change underneath all of it.

That's what I mean when I call this operational intelligence, or organizational memory. I think it transfers fairly easily across industries, because underneath all of it, these folders are just standard operating procedures that already exist, maybe in someone's head or an old PDF, that just need to be converted into a format models can actually use: folders and markdown.