Chief of Staff. The team task list every department writes to.
Beacon queues a "Review audit" task. Your Sales department drops "Reach out to top deal." Operations pings on a flagged exception. Engineering flags a stack change. When something breaks, the failure lands here automatically — no digging through logs. Your team sees one board — Active / In flight / Done — with claim, blockers, and a comment trail. Included free in the Operations department.
What Chief of Staff does.
Every Drive writes to it
Beacon, Sales, Operations, Engineering — every department and specialist Drive queues tasks here when work needs an owner. Source-stamped so you see at a glance which Drive surfaced each item.
Multi-user claim + comments
Any teammate on the account claims a task in one click. Block with a reason. Comment thread per task records who did what, when. The board reads like a team — not a personal to-do.
Three-column board
Active → In flight → Done. Click Claim to move a task; click Complete to ship it; archive when irrelevant. Priority chips (🚀 Launch / 🔍 Verify / 🛠 Product) sort the most urgent work to the top.
Waiting state when uninstalled
If you haven't hired your COO yet, tasks still queue silently from your installed Drives. Merkava shows a count: "7 tasks waiting from Beacon + Sales." When you flip the install switch, the board comes alive.
Per-venture or tenant-wide
Run one team across all your ventures or scope each list to a specific venture workspace. Cross-venture admin view rolls everything up so you know what's open everywhere.
Operator-added tasks too
The board isn't just exec-queued. Add your own tasks, set priority, assign to a teammate. Filter exec-queued vs operator-added when you want to see "what my execs are asking" vs "what I'm tracking myself."
Failures surface automatically
When an exec's task fails — Octokit rate-limit, network blip, mid-tick exception — the failure lands as a launch-priority Chief of Staff task with the error inline. You find out from the board, not by digging through /feed or waiting for a customer to complain.
Awaiting-approval auto-routes here
Anything an exec ships marked awaiting approval — OODA competitor moves you should respond to, internal-linking opportunities Beacon flagged, anything blocked on operator judgment — auto-creates a task. Zero manual triage; the board IS your inbox.
When it earns its keep.
- You're hiring multiple AI execs and the work they queue is bigger than what /feed alone surfaces
- You have teammates and need a shared "what's on us this week" surface, not a personal to-do
- You want Merkava to read as a team room, not a stream of activity
- You want a record of who claimed, who completed, who blocked — so weekly reviews aren't from-memory
Pairs well with.
Questions.
What is Chief of Staff?
Chief of Staff is the team task list inside Merkava. Every department — Marketing, Sales, Operations, Engineering — writes to it when it queues work the operator should track. Operators see one board with Active / In flight / Done columns, multi-user claim, blockers, and a comment trail per task.
Does it cost extra?
No. Chief of Staff comes included in the Operations department — hire a department, not a tool. Hire Operations at $199/mo or get every department in the Full C-Suite at $699/mo and Chief of Staff installs automatically on every venture under your COO.
What if I don't hire Operations?
Tasks still queue from your other Drives — they just sit waiting. Merkava shows a count: "7 tasks waiting from Beacon + Sales." When you hire the Operations department or install Chief of Staff directly, the queued tasks become an active board.
Multi-user — does my team see the same list?
Yes. Tasks are tenant-scoped, so any teammate signed into your Merkava account sees the same board. Each task can be claimed by one teammate; the comment trail records who claimed, who blocked, who completed.
Can I add my own tasks (not just from execs)?
Yes. Operators add tasks directly from the board. Source-stamped "manual" so you can filter exec-queued vs operator-added work.
What happens when an exec's task fails?
It lands here as a launch-priority Chief of Staff task with the error inline — for example, "Marketing.fix-pr failed: Octokit rate-limit exceeded." You see it on the board the next time you look, instead of finding out from a customer or noticing a missing weekly digest. The task includes a link straight to /feed?failed=<task-id> for the full failure context.
What's the difference between Chief of Staff and Linear / Asana / Notion?
Linear / Asana / Notion are generic project tools you populate yourself. Chief of Staff is wired to the execs running your departments — every Drive that does work for you queues tasks here automatically. The board reads as "what your departments need from you" rather than "what I need to remember to write down."
Hire your COO. Get Chief of Staff free.
Operations department at $199/mo includes Chief of Staff. Full C-Suite at $699/mo includes all five departments plus every bundled Drive.