Glossary
What is a slow maybe?
A request that is never refused and never advanced — kept alive by silence, costing the requester repeated follow-ups and the team repeated re-reading, until it dies unrecorded.
The slow maybe feels kinder than a no and costs more relationship than one: the requester spends months on hope, learns the process cannot be trusted, and escalates next time. A recorded decline with a readable reason — or a park with a review date — is the respectful version.
Slow maybe vs parking a request
Both mean "not now", and only one of them says so. A parked request is a recorded decision: it has a review date and the condition that would bring it back, and the requester knows both. A slow maybe has neither — no date, no condition, no answer — so the requester keeps asking, the team keeps re-reading, and the request stays open because closing it would mean saying something.
The test is simple: can the requester find out, without asking anyone, what is going to happen to their request and when? If not, it is a slow maybe, whatever the queue calls it. A park with no review date fails the test too; it is a slow maybe with paperwork.
Turning a slow maybe into a decision
Find the requests that have never had a decision — not the old ones, the undecided ones. For each, choose an exit: plan it, park it with a date and a condition, or decline it with a reason. Then tell the requester in two or three sentences: what was decided, why, and what would change it.
An example of a readable no: "We are not taking on bulk editing this half. The two teams who could build it are committed to the billing migration until autumn. If manual edits become a real support burden before then, bring it back and we will decide again." It takes a minute to write, and it ends months of follow-ups on both sides.
Why it feels kinder, and is not
A slow maybe spares the person saying it one uncomfortable moment and charges the requester for it over months: they plan around a request that is not coming, follow up into silence, and eventually learn that the process cannot be trusted. The next request from them arrives escalated, or never arrives through the front door at all. A clear no with a reason is a small cost paid once; a slow maybe is a larger one paid repeatedly, by the person with the least power to end it.
Related terms
- Demand — A work request that has entered the delivery lifecycle — the unit a delivery governance system tracks from intake to decision.
- Clarification brief — A short artifact that separates what is known from what is assumed from what is still an open question, produced when a raw request is shaped into a demand.
- Demand management — The practice of deciding what happens to requested work — shaping raw requests into decidable demands, refusing or parking some on the record, and committing the rest against real capacity.
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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