Phase A - Feed (The Inlet)

Overview

The Feed phase is the inlet of the pipeline. It transforms a raw, loosely-specified human requirement into a precise, self-contained ticket that is ready to be triggered whenever you choose. Nothing in the Forge phase begins until you say so.

The key insight: staging a ticket costs almost nothing. Triggering a ticket has a real cost - agent time, compute, your attention for the Validation Package. The Feed phase protects you from triggering work that is not yet well understood.

Step 1 - Submit the requirement

You (the Orchestrator) drop a raw requirement into the Inlet. The format is deliberately unconstrained. It can be:

• A one-line user story: "As a user, I want to reset my password by email."
• A paragraph of context: "Our analytics dashboard is missing a week-over-week comparison view. Users keep asking about it in support tickets."
• A link to a Figma mockup with a note: "Build this."
• A voice memo transcript.

The AI PM receives it and creates a draft ticket in the Inbox state. No work starts at this point.

Step 2 - PM refines the ticket

The AI PM takes the raw requirement and frames it into a well-formed ticket:

• Title and user story
• Acceptance criteria
• Priority
• Dependencies on other staged or in-flight tickets

For straightforward tickets the PM can do this alone. For larger or cross-cutting work the PM pulls in the Analytic to co-author a richer task description: which areas of the product the change touches, which existing use cases it interacts with, what the expected user-visible behaviour looks like end-to-end.

Important: the goal of Feed is not to produce a full technical specification. API contracts, data models, component lists, sequence diagrams - those belong in the Forge phase, after you trigger the ticket. Feed produces only what the agents need to confidently start: a clear description of what is wanted and why.

If either agent encounters genuine ambiguity that cannot be resolved by inferring user intent, they surface a specific, minimal question to the Subject Matter Expert - never vague ("Can you tell us more?") and always with concrete options ("Should deleted records be permanently purged after 30 days, or retained indefinitely?").

Step 3 - Ticket moves to Staged

Once the PM is satisfied that the ticket has clear acceptance criteria and an unambiguous task description, the ticket transitions to the Staged state.

A staged ticket is a promise: if you trigger this ticket right now, the agents have everything they need to start the Forge phase without coming back to you for clarification of intent.

Note: Staged does not mean prioritised. You may have dozens of staged tickets. The Orchestrator decides which ones to trigger and when, based on current business priority.

Step 4 - You trigger the ticket

When you are ready - when you know you will have 10-15 minutes later in the day to review a Validation Package - you trigger the staged ticket.

The ticket transitions to In Progress and the Forge phase begins.