Welcome to the incubator — how the pre-product funnel works

[don-petry]

Welcome to incubator — the pre-product front-of-funnel for petry-projects.

This repo is where an idea lives before it earns a repo of its own: raw idea Discussions that aren't yet tied to a product, the decision brief / PRD-lite an idea is judged on, and disposable POCs. Approved products already own their PRDs in their own repos (_bmad-output/planning-artifacts/) — this fills the missing stage before that.

The lifecycle

Stage	Gate	Where it lives
Raw idea capture	—	Discussions here (Ideas category) — for ideas not tied to an existing product repo. Ideas about an existing product still go in that product's repo.
Enhancement + decision brief / PRD-lite (Mary, Analyst)	before idea:approved	ideas/<slug>/
POC / spike (throwaway)	after idea:approved	pocs/<slug>/ (or a disposable poc-<slug> repo if it needs its own CI/deploy)
Graduation to a real product	after the POC proves out	a new product repo (full PRD by John, PM)

Graduation is a boundary, not organic growth — a proven POC seeds a new product repo; nothing grows up here.

How to log an idea

Open a Discussion in the Ideas category. Keep it short — problem + who it's for is enough to start. From there it flows into the org ideation pipeline (feature-ideation → idea-triage → idea:approved → initiative-planner), and once it's "Ripe," Mary drafts a decision brief you decide go/no-go on. Discovery comes before the PRD: the brief informs the decision, it doesn't replace it.

Where this came from

The repo scaffold, lifecycle rules, and the decision-brief / market-research / opportunity-solution-tree templates are in the founding PR: #1. Read that for the full rationale (why here vs. .github or a repo-per-idea) and the templates under ideas/_TEMPLATE/.

Follow-ups tracked separately: enabling the add-to-project board flow (in #1), the org compliance bootstrap (rulesets/labels/settings), and wiring the decision-brief agent stage.