Role-Specific Applications

Same Framework, Different Purposes

A marketing director and a freelance copywriter both built workflows using the Chapter 7 structure. Same five components. Completely different implementations.

The director’s workflow aggregated team updates from multiple sources, synthesized them into leadership summaries, and distributed status reports. The copywriter’s workflow gathered client feedback from various channels, consolidated it into project files, and generated revision checklists.

Same framework—Trigger, Input, Processing, Review, Action. Different purposes entirely.

The five-component structure is universal. But what makes a good trigger, what inputs matter, and how review works varies significantly by role. A workflow designed for personal productivity won’t serve a team coordinator’s needs. A workflow built for strategic decision-making won’t help someone who needs to produce deliverables faster.

This chapter shows you how to adapt the framework to match your specific role and responsibilities.

Understanding role patterns isn’t about rigid categories—it’s about recognizing that a workflow designed for one context won’t work in another. A manager’s workflow that aggregates team information would be useless for an IC who needs to prepare for client calls. An IC’s research prep workflow would miss the point for a CEO who needs daily decision support.

Workflow Patterns by Role

Different roles have characteristic challenges that shape what workflows should do. Understanding your role’s patterns helps you design workflows that actually fit how you work.

Department Heads: Coordination and Visibility

If you manage a team, your characteristic challenges are:

Managing information across multiple people. You need to know what everyone is doing without micromanaging.
Reporting up and coordinating across. Your job includes keeping leadership informed and working with peer departments.
Making decisions that affect others. Your choices impact team members’ work and priorities.
Scaling knowledge beyond yourself. What you know needs to reach your team, and what they know needs to reach you.

High-value workflow patterns for department heads:

Status aggregation: Collecting updates from team members and synthesizing them into coherent summaries. Weekly team status, project progress reports, milestone tracking.

Performance summarization: Transforming metrics and data into insights. Dashboard summaries, trend analysis, exception flagging.

Communication standardization: Creating consistent messaging across contexts. Team announcements, stakeholder updates, cross-functional communication.

Decision documentation: Capturing the reasoning behind choices. Meeting summaries that record decisions, policy documents, process explanations.

Example workflow: Weekly Status Synthesis

Trigger: Friday at 2 PM (time-based)
Input: Project tool updates, standup notes, 1:1 highlights, escalations
Processing: Summarize progress by project, flag blockers, identify patterns, draft leadership talking points
Review: Verify accuracy, add strategic context, protect 1:1 confidentiality
Action: Post to team wiki, share highlights in Slack, save leadership prep

The trigger matches the management rhythm (end of week). The inputs are team-level sources. The processing focuses on aggregation and pattern detection. The action serves coordination and reporting needs.

Notice how different this is from an IC’s workflow. A department head doesn’t need help doing tasks—they need help knowing what’s happening across their team. The workflow serves coordination, not personal productivity.

Individual Contributors: Personal Leverage

If you produce work directly rather than managing others, your characteristic challenges are:

Maximizing personal output. Your value comes from what you produce.
Managing multiple demands. You often juggle several projects or responsibilities.
Building reputation through quality. Your work represents you.
Learning and skill development. Staying effective requires continuous improvement.

High-value workflow patterns for individual contributors:

Task preparation: Gathering context and research before starting work. Call prep, research synthesis, project background assembly.

Draft generation: Creating first passes on deliverables. Report drafts, email templates, content outlines.

Quality checking: Self-review assistance before submission. Proofreading, consistency checking, requirements verification.

Learning synthesis: Capturing knowledge for future use. Meeting notes, research summaries, best practice documentation.

Example workflow: Design Research Prep

Trigger: New design task assigned (event-based)
Input: Requirements document, user research, competitive examples, design system components
Processing: Summarize requirements, extract user pain points, identify relevant patterns, generate initial design directions
Review: Verify interpretation accuracy, add creative judgment, validate feasibility
Action: Save to project folder, add starting points to design file, block focused work time

The trigger matches the IC work assignment flow. The inputs are task-specific, not team-level. The processing enhances personal productivity. The action produces personal deliverables.

The contrast with the department head workflow is stark. An IC doesn’t need to aggregate information across people—they need to prepare for their own work. Same framework structure, completely different purpose and content.

Small Company CEOs: Decision Support and Time Efficiency

If you run a small company, your characteristic challenges are:

Too many decisions, too little time. You’re the decision bottleneck.
Wearing multiple hats. CEO today, sales rep tomorrow, HR in between.
Limited support staff. No army of analysts or assistants.
High-stakes choices with minimal data. You make calls without complete information.

High-value workflow patterns for CEOs:

Research synthesis: Consolidating competitive intelligence, market data, and business information.

Communication drafting: Stakeholder updates, investor communications, company announcements.

Decision preparation: Pros/cons analysis, option evaluation, risk assessment.

Meeting efficiency: Agenda preparation, meeting summaries, follow-up tracking.

Example workflow: Daily Priority Briefing

Trigger: Every morning at 7 AM (time-based)
Input: Yesterday’s emails, today’s calendar, project tool updates, key metrics
Processing: Identify urgent items, summarize important messages, suggest priority order
Review: Adjust priorities based on judgment, add context AI couldn’t know
Action: Set day’s focus, respond to urgent items, update task list

The trigger matches CEO time pressure (start of day). The inputs span the business (not one project or team). The processing supports decision-making. The action drives daily execution.

CEOs don’t have the luxury of deep focus on one project or even one function. The workflow serves as a forcing function for staying informed and prioritized across everything. It’s decision support, not task support.

The key difference from other roles: CEOs need to make choices constantly, often without complete information. Workflows that help them see the landscape and prioritize have outsized impact.

Senior Leaders: Strategic and Organizational

If you’re a VP or C-suite leader, your characteristic challenges are:

Information overload from multiple sources. Too much signal, too much noise.
Making decisions with incomplete information. You can’t wait for perfect data.
Communication at scale. Your messages need to reach hundreds or thousands.
Translating strategy to execution. Connecting high-level direction to concrete action.

High-value workflow patterns for senior leaders:

Intelligence synthesis: Market trends, competitive moves, internal signals.

Communication amplification: Consistent messaging across channels and audiences.

Meeting preparation: Board meetings, leadership offsites, all-hands events.

Policy and strategy documentation: Capturing and communicating strategic decisions.

Example workflow: Board Meeting Preparation

Trigger: One week before scheduled board meeting (calendar-based)
Input: Department reports, financial summaries, strategic initiative updates, market intelligence, investor questions from previous meetings
Processing: Synthesize key themes across reports, identify strategic highlights and concerns, draft talking points for each agenda item, flag items needing board decisions
Review: Verify accuracy of financial claims, add political context, ensure messaging consistency, protect sensitive personnel matters
Action: Finalize board deck sections, prepare Q&A talking points, schedule pre-meetings with key board members

The trigger matches the cyclical nature of board governance. The inputs span the entire organization. The processing focuses on strategic synthesis and communication. The action prepares for high-stakes stakeholder engagement.

Senior leaders face a unique challenge: their communication reaches large audiences and sets organizational direction. A misstatement cascades. A missed signal becomes a strategic blind spot. Their workflows must help them see broadly while communicating precisely.

Adapting the Five Components

When you understand your role’s patterns, you can adapt each workflow component specifically.

Triggers by Role

Department heads often use time-based triggers (weekly reviews, monthly summaries) or milestone-based triggers (project phase completion, quarterly planning).

Individual contributors often use event-based triggers (task assignment, meeting scheduled) or personal rhythm triggers (daily prep routine, end-of-day wrap-up).

CEOs often use time-based triggers (daily briefing, weekly review) or threshold-based triggers (decision needed, problem escalated).

Senior leaders often use calendar-based triggers (before board meeting, before all-hands) or cyclical triggers (quarterly reviews, annual planning).

Input Differences

Department heads draw from multiple sources: project tools, team channels, 1:1 notes, cross-functional updates.

ICs draw from task-specific sources: project requirements, client communications, relevant research.

CEOs draw from business-wide sources: email, calendar, metrics dashboards, key project updates.

Senior leaders draw from enterprise sources: market intelligence, organizational signals, strategic reports.

Processing Focus

Department heads need aggregation, pattern detection, and exception flagging—making sense of team-level information.

ICs need preparation, drafting, and quality enhancement—making individual work better.

CEOs need synthesis, decision support, and priority identification—making better choices faster.

Senior leaders need strategic analysis, communication scaling, and policy translation—connecting strategy to execution.

Review Considerations

Department heads should verify impact on team, consistency with past decisions, and stakeholder implications.

ICs should check output quality, accuracy for the specific task, and brand/reputation protection.

CEOs should assess business impact, opportunity cost, and alignment with strategy.

Senior leaders should evaluate organizational implications, stakeholder perception, and policy consistency.

Action Differences

Department heads direct actions toward team distribution and upward reporting—sharing summaries with team members, posting updates for leadership, coordinating across departments.

ICs direct actions toward personal deliverables—saving research to project folders, creating draft documents, blocking focused work time.

CEOs direct actions toward decisions and delegation—setting priorities, responding to urgent items, assigning follow-ups to the right people.

Senior leaders direct actions toward organizational communication and policy implementation—distributing messages across channels, documenting strategic decisions, cascading direction to department heads.

The action component often reveals whether your workflow truly matches your role. If you’re a manager but all your actions are personal (saving to your own folders, updating your own task list), your workflow might be more IC-focused than you realize. If you’re an IC but all your actions involve distributing to others, you might be doing coordination work that warrants its own workflow.

Building Your Role-Specific Workflow

Start with your Chapter 7 workflow and adapt it:

Identify your role pattern. Which challenges match yours? Coordination? Personal leverage? Decision support? Strategic communication?
Adjust your trigger. Does it match your work rhythm? Time-based for managers, event-based for ICs, daily for CEOs.
Expand your inputs. Are you capturing role-relevant sources? Team data for managers, task data for ICs, business data for CEOs.
Focus your processing. Does it address your characteristic challenges? Aggregation for managers, preparation for ICs, synthesis for CEOs.
Shape your review. Are you protecting against your specific risks? Privacy for managers, quality for ICs, strategic alignment for leaders.
Connect your action. Does it fit how you actually work? Team distribution for managers, personal deliverables for ICs, decisions and delegation for CEOs.

Most people don’t fit cleanly into one category. If you wear multiple hats, build different workflows for different modes. Your strategic planning workflow might follow the CEO pattern while your project management workflow follows the IC pattern.

Two Role Adaptations in Action

The Engineering Manager’s Coordination Workflow

Sofia manages nine engineers. Her initial workflow (meeting summaries) was fine but missed her core responsibility: team coordination.

She redesigned for her role: Friday team status synthesis. Inputs included Jira updates, standup notes, 1:1 highlights. Processing aggregated progress, flagged blockers, and drafted leadership talking points. Review verified accuracy and protected 1:1 confidentiality.

Result: Friday compilation dropped from 60 minutes to 20 minutes. She arrived at Monday leadership syncs better prepared. Her director noticed the improvement.

The key insight: Sofia’s original meeting summary workflow was useful but generic. It would have helped anyone in any role. Her redesigned workflow specifically addressed her management responsibilities—aggregating across people, not enhancing her personal work.

The UX Designer’s Personal Leverage Workflow

Ty designs patient-facing mobile apps. His challenge was juggling multiple projects while maintaining quality.

He built a design research prep workflow: triggered by task assignment, drawing from PRDs and user research, generating design direction options. Review verified interpretation accuracy and added creative judgment.

Result: Time to first draft dropped from 4-6 hours to 2-3 hours. He could handle more concurrent projects. Quality improved because designs were grounded in research from the start.

Ty also noticed a secondary benefit: the workflow forced him to check for existing user research before starting. Previously, he sometimes discovered relevant research halfway through a design—too late to incorporate easily. Now that research synthesis happened automatically at the start of every project.

Same framework. Different role adaptations. Both successful because they matched how these people actually work.

If Sofia had used Ty’s workflow (design prep), it wouldn’t have addressed her coordination needs. If Ty had used Sofia’s workflow (team synthesis), it wouldn’t have helped his individual output. The framework is universal; the application must be role-specific.

Both also iterated. Sofia’s first version didn’t include leadership talking points—she added that after realizing Monday prep was a separate pain point. Ty’s first version generated too many design directions—he refined the processing to be more selective. Role-specific workflows evolve as you discover what your role actually needs.

Common Objections

“I wear multiple hats—which role should I use?”

Build different workflows for different hats. When you’re coordinating your team, use manager patterns. When you’re producing deliverables directly, use IC patterns. The framework adapts.

“These examples don’t match my exact role.”

They’re patterns, not prescriptions. Identify which challenges most match yours, and adapt accordingly. A consultant might combine IC (personal leverage) and CEO (decision support) patterns.

“My first workflow was generic—should I rebuild it?”

Try adapting before rebuilding. Review each component through your role lens. Often small adjustments—changing triggers, adding role-relevant inputs—improve a generic workflow without starting over.

“The role patterns overlap for me.”

That’s common and fine. Many department heads also do IC work. Many ICs have coordination responsibilities. Build multiple workflows if needed—one for each mode of work. The framework handles this by being modular.

“How do I know if my workflow is role-appropriate?”

Ask: Does this workflow address my characteristic challenges? If you’re a manager and your workflow doesn’t help with coordination or visibility, it’s probably more IC-focused. If you’re an IC and your workflow doesn’t help with personal productivity, something’s misaligned.

“Can I use someone else’s workflow template for my role?”

Starting from a template is fine, but expect to customize. Someone else’s manager workflow uses their team’s tools, their reporting rhythm, their leadership expectations. The pattern transfers; the specifics don’t.

Your Monday Morning Action Item

Review your Chapter 7 workflow through your role lens:

Which role pattern best matches your context?
Does your trigger match your work rhythm?
Are your inputs capturing role-relevant information?
Does your processing address your characteristic challenges?
Is your review protecting against your specific risks?
Does your action connect to how you actually work?

Make one adaptation based on this review. Run the workflow again.

The five-component structure is universal. The implementation is personal. Chapter 9 will show you how to design better inputs—the component that most affects output quality.