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Intake and Stage Gates

Purpose

This document describes how a new venture idea, or a new product idea within an existing venture, enters the company's pipeline, and the stage gates it must pass through as it advances. It aligns with the company product/artifact lifecycle described in ../docs/architecture/artifact-lifecycle.md — this document is the portfolio-level entry point into that lifecycle, not a replacement for it.

Intake: new venture idea

  1. Capture. Record the idea in portfolio/opportunity-backlog.md with enough detail to evaluate later — problem, rough evidence, why it might fit Devonshire Digital.
  2. Initial evaluation. Assess against portfolio/prioritization-framework.md. This does not need to be formal for an early idea, but should be explicit rather than assumed.
  3. Scaffold, don't commit. If worth exploring, a venture directory may be created from ventures/_template/ to begin strategy work. Creating the directory is not a commitment — see ventures/_template/README.md for the explicit rule that a venture is not registered in portfolio/venture-registry.json until it is ready.
  4. Registration. Once strategy work (at minimum, a completed docs/strategy/venture-brief.md) supports treating this as a real venture, register it in portfolio/venture-registry.json and reflect the venture's own venture.json accordingly.

Intake: new product idea within a venture

  1. Capture. Record the idea in the relevant venture's own portfolio or backlog (or in portfolio/opportunity-backlog.md if it is genuinely cross-venture in nature).
  2. Evaluation. Assess against portfolio/prioritization-framework.md, informed by the venture's own strategy documents (product principles, target users).
  3. Approval for specification work. A product idea should not get a products/[product-slug]/ directory with active specification work until it has been explicitly approved to proceed — this is the company/venture-level judgment call, not an automatic outcome of having an idea.
  4. Registration. Once approved for specification work, add the product to portfolio/product-registry.json.

Stage gates (aligned to the company artifact lifecycle)

See ../docs/architecture/artifact-lifecycle.md for the authoritative description of lifecycle stages and their entry/exit criteria. At a portfolio level, the gates that matter most are:

  • Idea → Approved for specification: passes intake above.
  • Specification → Build-ready: specification review passed (see ../prompts/specification-review.md for the checklist used).
  • Build-ready → Released: release readiness review passed (see ../prompts/release-readiness-review.md).

What this document does not do

It does not itself decide any specific venture's or product's fate — it describes the process by which those decisions get made and recorded.

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