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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.
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.