📝 "Can you write the postmortem?" is really seven asks — assigning sections of a Confluence page to

[#1]

Hi everyone,

Most requests to write something start out vague. "Can you take the postmortem?" is really seven separate asks — timeline, root cause, customer impact, detection, remediation, action items, lessons — pointed at four different people, with one deadline nobody wrote down.

The last article walked through what Inkwell does. This one is about the part that does the most work in practice: turning a vague ask into an explicit list of requests, on the page itself.

📝 One ask per section

Creating a section is really writing a request — a title, instructions, an assignee (required; a request without a recipient isn't a request), a due date, and optionally a reviewer. The previous article covered what each field does. The one worth thirty extra seconds is Instructions, capped at 2,000 characters.

"Root Cause Analysis" leaves the writer guessing. "Cover what failed, why the alerts didn't fire, and what we'd need to catch it earlier" tells them what done looks like — which is the thing that usually stays in the requester's head.

 

📥 On the receiving end

There's no separate inbox to check. Every request with your name on it shows up under To work on in the My Sections dashboard, across all pages, sorted by due date.

Hitting Start Working puts the section's heading into the page body with a "Write here…" placeholder, so the ask has a physical place in the document instead of being an abstract line item.

✨ Rough notes in, a draft out — without leaving the page

Once you've started, Draft with AI can take your notes the rest of the way — but it won't write from nothing. It asks for your rough draft first: bullet points, fragments, a messy paragraph, in whatever language you write. Claude Sonnet 5 shapes that into a clean section body, in the same language.

Two things ride along without any copy-pasting: the section's title, and the requester's instructions — the thirty seconds spent writing the ask pays off a second time here. The result shows up as an editable preview, and inserting it only ever touches the area under this section's heading.

 

👀 What you asked for, and who has the ball

The requester's side is two views on the dashboard:

Requested by me — everything you created and handed to someone else, at any status
Waiting — things sitting with someone else, labelled with who you're waiting on and why (· writing or · review)
That's the answer to "did I ever ask someone to do that?" — without re-reading a month of Slack.

 

Why the list matters more than the tracking
Half of what makes a shared document stall isn't laziness — it's that the ask was never made concrete enough to act on. Writing seven explicit requests takes about two minutes, and most of the tracking that follows becomes unnecessary, because everyone can already see what was asked of whom.

Details are also available on the website.
🔗 Marketplace link

Next time someone asks "can you take the postmortem?" — try answering with seven sections instead of one nod.

Until then, I'm curious how your team hands off writing today: a table of owners at the top of the page, Jira tickets, or just asking? Comments welcome.

[Mia Tamm _Simpleasyty_]

Hi @Yuta_MiddleCore_ really interesting approach. I especially like the idea of treating each “ask” as a clearly defined section instead of trying to solve everything with one large prompt.

The reviewable draft step also feels important. Keeping the generated content visible and easy to validate before it becomes part of the final document makes the workflow much more practical for real teams.

I can see this working particularly well for postmortems, but also for other structured Confluence content such as project reviews, decision records, or recurring reports.

Thanks for sharing the workflow in such a clear way!

[Yuta_MiddleCore_]

Hi  @Mia Tamm _Simpleasyty_  thanks for reading!

The review step was actually the part I went back and forth on the most. It would have been easy to let an AI draft go straight into the page, but then "AI wrote it" quietly becomes an excuse to skip review. So AI drafts go through the same Submit for Review as everything else — no shortcut.

Decision records hadn't occurred to me, but you're right, Context / Options / Decision / Consequences is basically already a section list. Might steal that for the next article :)

[Anwesha Pan]

Thanks @Yuta_MiddleCore_ for sharing this article, it's interesting to know about it.