A calm system for
intelligent work.
You weren't hired to be the operating system. You were hired to build one.
Nova is the operating layer that lets teams work with focus and decide with confidence — without sitting in meetings all day.
Get your evenings back inside 90 days.
Free to start No credit card Pre-built processes — running in your team within an hour
The chief of staff software for installing operating cadence. Built for leadership meetings, OKRs, decision logs, and the team rituals that turn strategy into action.
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The operating layer your team has been missing.
A calm system for intelligent work. Nova is the operating layer that lets teams work with focus and decide with confidence — without sitting in meetings all day. It replaces meeting culture with structured execution: every initiative has an owner, every decision is logged, every recurring process compounds instead of restarting from scratch.
Other tools track documents or tasks. Nova builds the rituals that become how a team works — the discipline that makes culture, the cadence that makes speed, and the structure that lets people move without checking in for permission.
" You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your processes.
— James Clear, Atomic Habits
Rituals that don't run on motivation
Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly rhythms that compound. Progress, clarity, and team cohesion stop depending on who's "on" today. The cadence carries the momentum.
Half the meetings, twice the outcomes
Pre-reads sent ahead. Status updates async. Meetings exist to decide, not to update. Most teams cut leadership meeting time by 30–50% in the first month.
A decision log that actually holds
Every decision logged with owner, deadline, and rationale. Decisions stop getting re-litigated. The log is the source of truth — not someone's memory or a Slack thread you can't find.
Minimum standards your team actually meets
Define what "good" looks like once. Build it into every session. No more "send me what you did" — what gets done IS the standard, every time.
Like what you're reading?
Try Nova free — no credit card. Most teams are running their first leadership session within an hour.
Your operating cadence — on one canvas.
Q1 through Q4. Weekly, monthly, quarterly rituals. Pre-built sessions wired up. Build it once · run it every quarter — nothing rebuilt from scratch.
OKRs & Operating Cadence 2026
A real Nova canvas. Pre-built. No setup. Same shape every quarter — your team learns it once.
Whatever's on fire right now, there's a Nova process for it.
You don't have to build the operating system from scratch. Four pre-built processes — used by chiefs of staff in Series A through D companies — ready to run in your team this week.
First 90 Days as Chief of Staff
For the CoS in their first 90 days who's tired of "just help me" — ready to install structure instead of replacing it with themselves.
What's inside
- Stakeholder listening tour — structured conversations to map the org
- Decision log + first leadership session
- Rhythm of business — daily, weekly, monthly
- First quarterly planning that carries forward
- AI roles defined inside your processes
- Day 90 vacation — phone-free, no fires
OKRs + Operating Cadence
For the CoS who's watched OKRs become a pretty deck nobody references after the kickoff. Install OKRs that are still alive in week 11.
What's inside
- Week 1 — CEO sets 3–5 Objectives (no more)
- Week 2 — Honest cascade to each function
- Week 3 — Check-in cadence wired into your rituals
- Week 4 — Mid-quarter pressure-test built in
- Templates for status, escalations, recommits
- Carries forward to next quarter — no rebuild
Monthly Business Review
A high-impact 90-minute leadership session designed to identify and correct performance drift before it impacts quarterly goals. Move beyond status updates — focus on decisions and course correction.
What's inside
- Training session — how the MBR works and what makes it different from a status meeting
- Recurring monthly meeting organized by quarter — runs itself once installed
- Monthly OKR signal review — surface the red signals, identify what's actually happening
- Structured discussion → decision → owner — every red signal gets a response, not just a flag
Good Management Rituals
For the company that wants every manager running the same baseline. The rituals that define what "good management" means here — and turn company objectives into actual team action.
What's inside
- Monthly priority-setting meeting — the team's focus, deliverables, and owners for the month
- Customizable add-ons — team-building surveys, kickoffs, retros, anything your team needs
- One standard, every team — what "good management" means at your company
- Strategy → action — company objectives become the team's monthly priorities
Not sure which one? Start with whichever pain is loudest this week. You can run all three — most chiefs of staff do, in this order.
From the operating system to the architect of one.
Self-reported by chiefs of staff using Nova for 90+ days. Six things they tell us they get back — in this order.
Strategic work / day
15% of time → 75%+ of time
Decisions logged
with owner, deadline & context
Work week
with weekly review & rituals
Real vacation by day 90
of CoSes report taking one
Your evenings come back
The CEO Slack at 10pm stops feeling like the only way the company runs. Your first Nova session produces clear outcomes — and you go home.
Your brain stops being the database
Decisions stop getting re-litigated. The same question doesn't get asked three times. The log is the source of truth — not your memory.
Your calendar gets purpose
Every recurring meeting becomes a Nova session with a clear outcome. The 75-minute leadership sync becomes 30 minutes. You get protected deep work — and you keep it.
Your CEO trusts the structure
They stop adding to your plate in 1:1s. They start asking which session a topic belongs in. You've installed something they actually use — and they've noticed.
Quarterly planning stops being scratch work
Last quarter's decisions are searchable. The cycle carries forward. What used to take 6 weeks of rebuild compresses into structured sessions.
You take a real vacation
Phone-free week. The team runs the rituals. Decisions get made. You come back to a queue, not a fire — and a CEO who tells the board you've changed how they operate.
*Results vary by company stage, team size, and how consistently processes are run. Methodology: self-reported time tracking and decision-log audit across 50+ chief of staff users onboarded onto Nova for 90+ days. Based on internal Nova data, 2024–2026.
Ready to install your operating cadence?
Start with the process that matches what's on fire — install it this week. Free to start, no credit card.
AI inside the work — not bolted on top of it.
Most tools added an AI sidebar. A chat box you can ask things in. The output stays personal. The team's work stays the same.
Nova was built differently. AI has roles inside the processes your team already runs. Researcher. Drafter. Synthesizer. Each one with a defined seat at the table — not a sidebar to interrupt.
AI executes within its role. Humans review, decide, lead. Quality stops being personal heroics — review is built in, not bolted on.
When AI is part of the work — not an extra tab beside it — the work gets better. So does the team.
A chat sidebar tacked onto the same docs and tasks. Output stays personal. The team's work doesn't change — it just produces faster output, no review structure.
What our clients are saying.
"We went from being stuck — with me having to be everywhere and overworking — to I'm working part-time and we opened a new office. What Nova gave me is time back to think, to grow, to achieve."
"It made my team proactive. They could start a project, move to next steps, and not wait for me. We also use it to gather feedback from clients async — it's helped us move things faster and given the team confidence to take ownership and initiative."
Join the chiefs of staff already running on Nova.
Try Nova free — no credit card required. Pre-built processes start running with your team within an hour.
Structure compounds. So does its absence.
Every week without it is another week of these numbers. Every week with it compounds the other direction.
You're at week 6. Or 12. Or 24.
The structure you don't install this quarter, you'll install under fire next quarter — with one more board cycle of catch-up baked in.
Common objections
What chiefs of staff usually ask first.
None of these match your fire? Browse the full process library — 300+ ready-to-run processes for hiring, onboarding, retros, performance cycles, offsites, and more. Or talk to us — we'll design a process specifically for your team and help you roll it out.
Most CEOs spend 10–15 minutes a week in the tool and walk away with more clarity on what's been decided — and what's coming — than they had before. They don't need to "adopt" anything. They just need to show up where they're useful.
Chief of staff vocabulary.
Definitions for the terms used throughout this page — so the language is shared, not assumed.
- Operating cadence
- The recurring rhythm of weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings a leadership team uses to set priorities, review progress, make decisions, and stay aligned. A working operating cadence converts strategy into team-level action without re-litigating the same questions every quarter.
- Decision log
- A searchable, owned record of every decision made by the leadership team — including what was decided, who decided it, when, and why. A working decision log prevents decisions from being silently re-made in different rooms two weeks later.
- Rhythm of business
- The predictable schedule of recurring business reviews — typically a weekly leadership sync, a monthly business review, and a quarterly planning cycle. It gives every team a known cadence for surfacing risks, locking decisions, and reporting progress.
- Leadership meeting structure
- The repeatable agenda and pre-read pattern a leadership team uses for its recurring meetings — including time-boxes, decision moments, and action capture. Good structure makes meetings shorter, decisions clearer, and follow-through automatic.
You came into this role to be strategic. Build the structure that makes that real.
Free to try. No credit card. Most chiefs of staff are running their first leadership meeting in Nova within an hour.
Free plan available Cancel anytime Used by chiefs of staff in 15 countries