An intake form is a door, not a net

Sooner or later every engineering team builds an intake form, and almost every one of them builds a net: a dozen fields, a category picker, a priority dropdown, and a submit button that files the result somewhere nobody is obliged to look. The form was supposed to bring order to the door. What it actually does is industrialise the disorder — the same undecidable requests arrive, now with metadata.

What the form is for

A request is decidable when it says what needs to change, and at least one of who is affected or why it matters now. That is the entire bar. A form earns its existence by holding that bar at the moment it is cheapest to hold — while the requester still has the context in their head — and by being allowed to say "not yet" when the answers are missing.

Most forms cannot say not yet. Every field is optional in practice, because the team was afraid friction would push requesters away — so the form collects whatever arrives and the real questions get asked in week six, by an engineer, of a requester who has forgotten. The friction did not disappear. It moved downstream, where it costs ten times as much.

Every extra field is paid by the requester

The moment of asking is the worst possible time to demand taxonomy. A requester who wants to report "checkout is slow on mobile" does not know your category tree, cannot rank priority against a portfolio they can't see, and should not be guessing effort. Those are the team's questions, answered at the team's stages — shaping, deciding, planning — by the people equipped to answer them.

So the test for every field: does the requester uniquely hold this information, and does the decision need it? What needs to change — yes. Who is affected — yes. Deadline or trigger, if one exists — yes. Category, priority, T-shirt size, sponsor, OKR alignment — no. The two-question form with a bar beats the twelve-field form without one, every time.

The property that makes it all work

None of this survives unless requests that clear the bar visibly move. A door that leads to silence teaches requesters the same lesson a slow maybe teaches them: the form is where requests go to die, and the way to get something done is a DM to whoever owes you a favour. Then the side channels return, and the form's data describes only the requests nobody cared about.

Visible movement does not mean fast delivery. It means every request gets a recorded state someone can check: shaped, parked with a reason, declined with a reason, planned, promised. The door works when going through it is the best way to get an answer — including when the answer is no.