Issues — In Practice

Everything starts with an Issue. The guide covers Issue types and lifecycle. This page covers how to handle them.

Relationship Map

Issues bridge Direction and Work Items. They also feed back into Direction when they reveal a problem with the team’s scope:

Direction (guiderails)
    │
    ▼
Issues Backlog   ← captured from everywhere
    │                  user feedback, monitoring, stakeholders,
    │                  incidents, team ideas
    │
    ├── Resolved directly (answer question, fix config, close incident)
    │
    └── Promoted to Work Item
           │
           ▼
       Delivery → Production Feedback
                      │
                      ├── generates new Issues
                      └── refines Direction guiderails

The Issues backlog never stops growing. The skill is continuous triage, not clearing it to zero.

Default Path + Branching

Default — any incoming Issue:

Capture → Triage → Decide → Act (resolve or promote) → Close

Incident (production failure):

Capture → Triage → Fix immediately → Post-mortem →
  ├── Close (one-off)
  └── Promote to Problem (recurring pattern) → Feature or Study

Incidents skip the normal queue. Fix first, classify after.

Quick question:

Capture → Triage → Direct research → Answer → Close

No Work Item needed.

Problem with unknown root cause:

Capture → Triage → Study →
  ├── Root cause found → Feature or Story to fix
  └── Hypothesis killed → Close, document finding

Study is the tool for unknowns. Never commit to fixing a Problem whose root cause you do not understand.

Infeasible or out-of-scope Idea:

Capture → Triage → Out of scope → Close promptly

Do not let Ideas linger. Close decisively when they clearly do not fit.

Issue that refines Direction:

Capture → Triage → Direction signal → Escalate to Direction review

When the same Problem surfaces repeatedly, the guiderails may need adjustment.

Role Map

Technique Table

Procedure Table

Artifact Table

Skip Conditions

Issues are freeform. If a one-line Issue captures what needs to happen, that is enough.