The Scenario
You are a customer success operations manager. You have spent the last week standardizing the company's onboarding methodology into six phases — Discovery, Technical Setup, Data Migration, Training, UAT, and Go-Live — each with a defined duration and a start offset from the project kick-off date.
That template lives in a Google Sheet. Column A is phase name, B is the start offset in days from the project start date (which is in cell E1), C is the duration in days. The new Rocketlane project ID is in cell B1.
Now you need to add all six phases to the project. The Rocketlane UI wants you to create each one individually, setting the date math by hand.
What that looks like:
- Open the project in Rocketlane
- Click "Add Phase," type the name, calculate the start date from the offset in the sheet, enter the duration
- Save. Click "Add Phase" again
- Calculate the next offset, realize you made an arithmetic error on phase three
- Correct it. Save. Continue
- Six phases, forty-five minutes, two date errors you caught and one you did not.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads your phase template and applies it to the Rocketlane project in one go, doing the date math inline.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Rocketlane phase for each row in the 'Phase Template' sheet — column A is phase name, B is start date offset (days from project start in cell E1), C is duration in days — all under project ID in cell B1.
SheetXAI reads the project start date from E1, resolves the offset for each phase, calculates the start and end dates, and creates all six phases under the project in sequence. No date math. No manual UI work.
What You Get
Six Rocketlane phases, added to the project in one prompt:
- Phase name — from column A
- Start date — calculated from the project start date in E1 plus the offset in column B
- End date — derived from the start date plus the duration in column C
- Sequential structure — phases land in the order they appear in the sheet
The template is reusable. The next time a new project lands, you update B1 with the new project ID, update E1 with the new start date, and run the same prompt. The phase structure is identical.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Phase templates evolve. SheetXAI handles variation inline.
When some phases have conditional durations
The UAT phase runs 10 days for enterprise customers and 5 days for SMB customers. The customer tier is in cell A1.
Read the customer tier from cell A1. If it is "Enterprise," set the UAT phase duration to 10 days. If it is "SMB," set it to 5 days. Then create all phases for project ID in cell B1 using the template in the 'Phase Template' sheet.
When the template has a phase the project does not need
Some projects skip the Data Migration phase because the customer has no legacy data. A flag in cell C1 indicates whether to include it.
If cell C1 says "No Migration," skip the Data Migration row when creating phases. Create all other phases under project ID in cell B1 with start offsets from column B and durations from column C.
When phase names need to match Rocketlane's existing naming conventions
Your template uses internal shorthand names that do not match the phase name format Rocketlane uses for reporting.
Before creating each phase, map the name in column A to the canonical Rocketlane phase name using this mapping: "Disco" → "Discovery," "Tech Setup" → "Technical Setup," "Mig" → "Data Migration," "Training" → "Customer Training," "UAT" → "User Acceptance Testing," "GL" → "Go-Live." Then create each phase under project ID in cell B1 with the mapped name.
When you need phases created across multiple new projects at once
You just created twelve projects from the Q2 deal sheet and all of them need the same phase structure.
Read the project IDs from column F of the 'New Deals' sheet. For each project ID, create the six phases defined in the 'Phase Template' sheet — phase name from column A, start offset from column B, duration from column C — using the project start date from column D of the 'New Deals' sheet as the base for each.
One prompt, twelve projects, seventy-two phases.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with your phase template, then ask it to add the phases to an existing Rocketlane project. The Rocketlane integration is included in every plan. For the next step, see how to bulk-create tasks from an implementation playbook or the Rocketlane in Google Sheets overview.