Last verified: September 17, 2026
What You Can Now Do
Context Memo now lets you set custom stages and timing rules for how memos move through idea → draft → review → publish workflows in the hopper calendar view. Until this deploy, every memo followed the same fixed path at the same pace, regardless of who had to sign off. Now the calendar shows your stages, with your names on them, and holds a memo at a gate until the rule you defined is satisfied. The task this changes: you stop chasing approvals in Slack threads and side spreadsheets. You encode the gate once, and the hopper enforces it for every memo after that.
Where It Is in Context Memo
Open the hopper and switch to calendar view. Cadence controls sit with the hopper's settings, and the stages you define appear as columns and gate markers on the calendar itself, so you can see which memos are waiting, which are cleared to publish, and which dates are already claimed. Settings are stored at the brand level, so they apply to every memo in that brand's hopper, including auto-generated ones.
How to Use It
- Open the hopper, switch to calendar view, and open cadence settings. You'll see the default path as the starting point.
- Define your stages. Add, rename, or remove steps between idea and publish so the sequence matches how your team actually works, including a named review or legal gate if you have one.
- Set the timing rule for each stage: how long a memo can sit there and when it becomes eligible to advance. Save, and the rules engine applies it immediately.
- Check the calendar. Memos already in the hopper re-sort against the new stages, and anything blocked at a gate is visible on the date it's waiting on.
- Move a memo by dragging it to a new date. If the move would skip a gate or break a timing rule, the hopper holds it and shows you which rule applied.
- Clear the final stage and publish to your own domain as usual. The automation pipeline respects the cadence, so scheduled and auto-generated memos queue behind the same gates rather than going out ahead of review.
Why We Built It
Teams told us they were locked into a single fixed publishing path, which meant their real editorial workflow lived somewhere else. Brand review happened in a doc. Legal sign-off happened in email. The hopper only knew about the finished result, so memos either sat unpublished while someone remembered to check the thread, or went live before the person who needed to read them had read them. For regulated and multi-stakeholder teams, that gap was the reason memo volume stayed low: not a content problem, an approval-tracking problem. Now the approval gate and the publish date are the same object.
What It Does Not Do Yet
Cadence settings are brand-level. If you manage several brands in Context Memo, configure each one separately, since a stage set for one brand does not propagate to the others. The rules govern sequence and timing only. They control when a memo can advance, not whether the memo is good, so a review stage still needs a human to read the draft and clear it. And this is workflow control inside the hopper, not a content management system. If your organization requires formal document versioning, records retention, or approval audit trails for compliance purposes, keep that system of record where it is and use the hopper stages to mirror it.
