Glossary

PO

the product owner: the human the work is done with and for. Every close ritual hands off to the PO; walkthroughs are driven by the PO. In a solo project, that's you wearing the reviewer hat.

Phase

the work unit: any chunk of work run through the rituals, in exactly one mode. Opens as a board, closes by distill + delete.

Session

one chat. One phase per session is the strong default, not a law: a phase survives a force-ended chat, and a fresh session picking its board back up is continuation, not error-recovery.

Mode

a phase's flavor: Product (building the product), System (tending the system itself), or Side (working the trackers). The mode sets the ritual's weight and focus, the board's template, the orient set, and the touch bands.

Kickoff

the one-time bootstrap that runs before the three-mode loop: it writes the strategy shelf (rather than orienting against it) and opens all ground because it's creating everything. Not a fourth mode — the ignition. See "The Kickoff" above.

Board

a phase's worklist and running record while open, in phases/, created from its mode's template. Scale varies by mode: product boards are heavy (workstreams + a walkthrough sibling); side boards are light (the tracker items pulled in); system boards fit the friction. Always tier: working while open; distilled and deleted at close — product phases leave a compact record.

Seed

a queued phase's accumulation space, one file in planning/queued/ for any mode: a pitch, dated notes, candidate scope, refs — never tasks. Folds into the board at phase open and is deleted.

Queue

the ROADMAP's What's Next: upcoming planned work of any mode, one mode-tagged list, every row carrying a seed. A staging area, never a gate — urgent work opens a board directly.

Ritual

a mode's defined opening steps (orient + touch-check included), during-rules, and closing steps. No phase is ritual-free.

Touch bands

a mode's three editing tiers: home ground (edit freely, per the board), careful (update deliberately when the work bears on it, never in passing), gated (another mode's ground — suggest, don't edit). Bands gate pens, not eyes: reading is never gated.

Walkthrough

a product phase's collaborative review doc: "Open for your call" + "Worth verifying" points, passed one by one with the PO before the phase can close.

Tracker

one of the three standing lists holding candidates — quick, lean task notes waiting between phases: the punch list (P##), the Open Questions log (§N), and Future Considerations (FC##). Phases pull items at open (a side phase usually pulls several — a sweep) and move the rows at close.

Tier

a doc's review cadence: bedrock · commitments · working · surface. Docs sink toward bedrock by surviving; reopening a settled one takes a structured challenge.

The law

"derived, never authored": every /system page renders from the docs at build time. To change a page, change its source doc; if they disagree, the docs win.

Source: CONTRIBUTING.md → Glossary