Pulse families
The pulse family catalog: Opportunity, Stall (with its five edges), and Milestone, with examples of each.
Every pulse belongs to exactly one family. Three families cover everything the system raises.
Opportunity
Something good is happening. Act before the window closes
A target account is back on your pricing page, a hot reply landed, someone raised their hand on a form
Stall
An edge of the loop cannot advance. The reason and the remedy come attached
A sync is failing, a play is waiting at its gate for your approval, a connector lost authorization
Milestone
A first, worth marking
First audience activated, first outcome attributed, a target reached
The five stall edges
Anyone can build the path where everything works. What matters is what you see when something doesn't. At every step of the loop, the platform either advances or tells you exactly what's in the way, and every stall names the edge it fired from:
Goal → KPI
Nothing under the goal is readable
The goal marked locked, the connector that opens it, and how many KPIs and plays that unlocks
KPI → Target
No achievable move, or the window is shorter than your sales cycle
"No target here yet," naming which of baseline, reference, or portfolio is missing
Target → Play
Capacity, a missing connector, or missing required data
A setup proposal: what to connect or configure, and what it would make possible
Play → Outcome
Plays ran and nothing landed
A prompt to re-diagnose. Never a second play stacked on the same theory
Outcome → Target
Identity doesn't resolve
The outcome counted, credited to nothing, and reported
Refusing to set a target is a feature. Any tool will happily produce a number. Saying "we won't guess, and here's what would let us know" is the more useful answer, and it's what the system actually believes rather than a bit of interface politeness.
A stall that needs your click (an approval, a merge proposal, a gated play) is still a stall: the human is the remedy. A stall that fires early (credit pacing, "you run out by this date") is a forecast of the same shape.
Mode and origin
Mode. A pulse is either decide (it needs an action from you) or inform (it tells you something worth knowing and folds into the digest). Only decide pulses can interrupt.
Origin. Pulses are generated at the moment they fire, from what the system actually observed. Pre-written sequences, like onboarding nudges, are lifecycle email, not pulses.
How the queue behaves, and how families relate to the app's tabs, lives in Families. Acting on a pulse is covered in Acting on a pulse.
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