Understanding Project Pulse & Signals
Summary
Project Pulse is the live view of what's happening inside a project, based on signals Asa extracted from your team's conversations. This guide explains the signal types, how to read the Pulse view, and how health scores are calculated.
Before You Start
Project Intelligence is already set up for this project (see: [Set up Project Intelligence](#)).
At least one processing cycle has completed and signals are visible.
What Is a Signal?
A signal is a structured piece of information Asa extracted from a real conversation. When your team says "we're blocked waiting for the vendor to send API docs," Asa creates a blocker signal with that context — not a copy of the message, but a clean, structured summary.
Signals are cumulative. Each 24-hour processing cycle adds new signals without removing old ones, so you build a running record of project history.
Signal Types
Type | What it captures |
|---|---|
Blocker | Something actively stopping progress |
Progress update | Concrete work moved forward |
Progress update | Concrete work moved forward |
Work completed | A task or feature marked done by the team |
Risk | A potential future problem identified |
Decision made | A choice recorded for future reference |
Waiting on dependency | Work paused pending an external factor |
Open question | An unresolved question that needs follow-up |
Handoff | Responsibility transferred between people |
Timeline change | Dates or deadlines shifted |
Scope change | Work added or removed from the project |
Release event | A deployment or release happened |
Incident | An issue or outage was reported |
Positive momentum | Team making strong progress |
Slowdown / negative momentum | Team pace or energy declining |
How to Read the Pulse View
Open any project and click the Pulse tab in the project panel.
The Pulse view shows:
Health status (on track / watch / at risk) at the top
Recent signals listed in reverse chronological order
Signal type badge (blocker, progress, risk, etc.)
Source — which conversation the signal came from
Timestamp — when Asa processed this signal
For blockers specifically, you can mark them as resolved directly from the Pulse view once your team has cleared the issue.
How Health Score Is Calculated
Asa scores project health on a 0–1 scale and converts it to a status label. Four factors are weighted:
Factor | Weight | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
Blockers | 35% | Active unresolved blocker signals |
Momentum | 25% | Ratio of positive vs. negative momentum signals |
Inactivity | 20% | How long since the last meaningful signal |
Confidence | 20% | Volume and recency of signals (low volume = lower confidence) |
Score range | Status shown |
|---|---|
0 – 0.3 | On track |
0.3 – 0.6 | Watch |
0.6 – 1.0 | At risk |
Important: Health score reflects what your team is saying, not what tasks are checked off. A project with no conversation may show low confidence even if work is progressing quietly.
Blocker Log
The blockers section shows a complete log for the project — not just what's blocking now, but a running record of every blocker Asa has ever surfaced.
Active zone (top): Open and stale blockers appear here. These are the ones that still need attention.
Past blockers (below): Resolved and auto-cleared blockers are listed in reverse chronological order. The five most recent show by default; click Show all to see the full history. Use this to understand patterns, share context with new team members, or audit what was blocking the project at a given point.
Stale Blockers
Blockers that go 7 days without new conversation activity are automatically marked as stale. They remain in the active zone with a grey Stale badge and muted styling. Stale blockers no longer count toward the health score, but project members can still mark them as resolved to move them into the history.
If a stale blocker is still a live problem, it will re-surface naturally when your team starts discussing it again in the connected channel.
Resolving Blockers
This action is available to project members and admins. You can resolve a blocker from the Pulse tab inside the project detail view.
Find the blocker signal (active or stale).
Click Mark as resolved.
The blocker moves to the Past blockers history and the health score recalculates immediately.
The history entry shows Resolved by [Name] · [time] so teammates know who cleared it.## Common Mistakes
Who resolved it: The history records which member marked the blocker resolved and when. If resolved from a bot (Teams, Slack, etc.), the platform is noted alongside the name.
Cleared automatically: When Asa detects a release or completion signal that overtakes a blocker, it marks the blocker as Cleared automatically. These appear in Past blockers without a name attached.
Common Mistakes
Expecting the score to update instantly. Fix: health score updates after the next processing cycle (every 24 hours), or when you manually resolve a blocker.
Treating health score as ground truth. It's a signal, not a verdict. A "watch" score on a well-run project just means the conversation is quieter than usual — check in with the team before escalating.
Ignoring low-confidence status. Low confidence means Asa hasn't seen enough conversation recently. This is worth investigating independently.
Troubleshooting
- Symptom: signals are stale (showing yesterday's news).
Likely cause: normal — processing runs every 24 hours.
Fix: wait for the next cycle, or contact support if no updates appear after 48 hours.
- Symptom: signal content looks like it came from the wrong project.
Likely cause: source channel is shared across multiple projects.
Fix: review the connected sources and disconnect channels that are too broad.
Related Articles
AI task suggestions: approve, dismiss, and create tasks