Sales promises to engineering: from the call to the pull request
How do you get a promise from a sales call to the engineers who build it?
A promise made on a call reaches engineering as a ref, and the pull request that does the work points back to it with one line.
The handoff that does not happen
Sales says yes on a call. Engineering plans the quarter from the roadmap. The two meet, if at all, in a Slack thread that starts with someone asking whether we promised that.
Each promise needs a name engineering can use, and the work needs a way to point back at it. Another status meeting gives it neither.
Give the promise a ref
Every promise a person keeps in CommitOps gets a ref such as C-142, with the sentence it came from, the account, the owner and the due date. Engineers see the ref and the title. The customer's words stay in CommitOps: the comment on a pull request never carries the quote.
Point the work at the promise
Write Satisfies C-142 in the title or body of a pull request or issue. Closes and Fixes work too, in any case. The link is made at once with confidence 1.00, and when the work merges a dated check records that the promise was met.
Two more passes find work nobody tagged. A shared roadmap slug links at 0.90. Similar text above 0.82 is only a proposal, and a person presses Link it or Not this on the promise page. Nothing below 0.90 links itself, and the database refuses it, because a wrong link tells a customer something shipped when it did not.
Show engineers what rides on it
On a private repository, CommitOps comments on the linked pull request with the ref, the promise's title, the account, the due date and the open deal money it holds up when it blocks a deal. On a public repository the comment carries the ref and nothing else. An engineer who sees the wrong promise replies not this one, and the link comes off.
What sales gets back
Sales stops asking engineering for status. The ledger shows each promise with its linked work and its state, and Gaps lists the promises with no work started, ranked by the pipeline waiting on them. The steps are in Connecting the PR to the promise.
Every company, person and figure in the examples belongs to the invented demo company in the sample ledger.