Glossary
What is the demand lifecycle?
The demand lifecycle is the path a work request takes from arrival to a closed outcome: Capture, Shape, Decide, Plan, Commit, Deliver, Learn — where a demand only walks the stages it needs.
The stages exist to place the expensive questions early: shaping before deciding, readiness before committing, an honest close before the lesson. A small demand can skip planning ceremony entirely; what no demand skips is the decision and the close.
The seven stages, and what each one is for
Capture takes the request in at a bar that makes it decidable. Shape turns it into an understanding: problem, outcome, impact, and what is known versus assumed versus unknown. Decide chooses the exit — plan, discover, park, decline. Plan establishes readiness: owner, per-team capacity, dependencies, decisions and risks. Commit records the promise against that capacity.
Deliver keeps the promise visible while it is being kept and then closes it with an outcome — what shipped, and what differed when the result was not clean. Learn requires a written lesson before the demand is complete. Each stage exists to stop the next one from being taken on faith.
Not every demand walks every stage
A small fix goes capture, shape, decide, a light delivery-plan confirmation in place of the full plan and commit, deliver, and closes with a light lesson. An unclear idea loops decide, discovery, decide again until there is enough to commit to or a reason to stop. An urgent compliance item may skip planning ceremony and commit with a recorded exception. The line is the same; the walk is not.
What no demand skips is the decision and the close. Skipping the decision produces work nobody chose; skipping the close produces a backlog of things that stopped changing without anyone saying whether they worked.
Related terms
- Intake
Work intake is the point where work requests enter an organisation, and the bar a request must clear there to become decidable: what needs to change, plus who is affected or why it matters now.
- Triage
Request triage is the decision about what happens next to each incoming request, with four recorded exits: plan it, run a time-boxed discovery, park it with a review date, or decline it with a reason.
- Backlog bankruptcy
Backlog bankruptcy is the deliberate closure of an oversized backlog by finally making the decisions it contains — each item leaving as a recorded decline with a reason, a park with a review date, or a survivor someone will still argue for out loud.
This definition comes from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.
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