--- name: pipeline-management-board description: "Despite the name, this is the tiered huddle cascade rather than a board of its own: what each level reviews, and the concrete condition that escalates a deal or a pattern to the level above, pointed at a sales pipeline instead of a shop floor. The board each of those levels actually stands at is the performance grid. Use when: Deals or patterns genuinely need to move from the rep level to leadership on a real cadence, and you want a checkable escalation condition instead of whoever remembers to mention it in a 1:1. Not for: There's genuinely only one level of review — a two-tier minimum is enforced because a single tier isn't tiered; a single sales team's daily standup doesn't need this structure. You don't have real people to name as owners yet — that's fine, the board will honestly show the gap; don't invent a name to make it look complete." --- # Pipeline management board Despite the name, this is the tiered huddle cascade rather than a board of its own: what each level reviews, and the concrete condition that escalates a deal or a pattern to the level above, pointed at a sales pipeline instead of a shop floor. The board each of those levels actually stands at is the performance grid. Family: Daily management · Format: .xlsx · Domain: commercial ## What it is A pipeline management board is the same tiered huddle cascade as the canonical version — what each level reviews, who runs it, and the concrete condition that sends something up to the level above — pointed at a sales pipeline instead of a shop floor. The lean connection is direct: a stalled deal is WIP, a recurring loss reason is a defect pattern, and the whole reason a tier system exists is the same reason it exists on a floor — the rep huddle catches a single stalled deal today, RevOps catches a pattern across pods this week, and VP Sales tracks whether the strategies from this year's revenue plan are actually moving the number. Who specifically runs each huddle is never guessed — every tier starts unassigned until you name a real person. ## When to use it Use it when: - Deals or patterns genuinely need to move from the rep level to leadership on a real cadence, and you want a checkable escalation condition instead of whoever remembers to mention it in a 1:1. - You want each tier to add something the tier below it doesn't already show — a real pattern or trend, not the same pipeline report read aloud at three different altitudes. - You already have (or are building) a revenue Hoshin or a funnel value stream map — this is the daily/weekly rhythm that keeps either one honest between planning cycles, not a replacement for either. Not when: - There's genuinely only one level of review — a two-tier minimum is enforced because a single tier isn't tiered; a single sales team's daily standup doesn't need this structure. - You don't have real people to name as owners yet — that's fine, the board will honestly show the gap; don't invent a name to make it look complete. ## How to fill it in - **tiers** — Drafted from each tier's name, cadence, attendees, and a rough note on what it watches — assign a real, named owner to each tier afterward. - **narrative** — Drafted from the ladder actually built. ## What good looks like The example below is Beacon Analytics' own three-tier pipeline cascade — the same company as the deal A3 and revenue Hoshin worked examples elsewhere in this catalogue. The AE pod huddle catches exactly the stalled-deal and win-rate-risk pattern the deal A3 diagnoses, and the VP Sales huddle tracks progress against exactly the win-rate target the revenue Hoshin commits to. Two of three tiers have a named owner; the middle tier is honestly left unassigned rather than padded with a placeholder name. Full worked example, on-screen and as a downloadable .xlsx: https://www.katafacts.com/katas/pipeline-management-board ## Common mistakes - **Every tier reviewing the same pipeline report, just to a bigger audience.** — The entire value of tiering is that each level up sees patterns and exceptions the tier below surfaced — if VP Sales is looking at the same stalled-deal list the pod huddle already reviewed, the extra meeting is pure overhead with no leverage. - **Writing an escalation condition like 'if a deal looks risky' or 'when it becomes a problem.'** — An unchecked condition can't actually be checked — a real cascade needs a concrete trigger (a stage-age threshold, a repeat-loss-reason count), or nobody can tell when something should have moved up and didn't. - **Naming a placeholder owner just to make every tier look assigned.** — A tier with a fake owner is worse than an honestly unassigned one — it hides exactly the gap the coverage check exists to surface. ## What it connects to Upstream: - **Performance grid** (`performance-grid`) — What each tier in this cascade is looking at. The cascade decides what travels between levels; the grid is the board a level stands at before anything travels at all. - **Deal A3 — win-rate root cause analysis** (`deal-a3`) — A stalled deal or a recurring loss pattern the pod huddle flags is frequently the trigger for a deal A3's own root-cause work, as in the worked example. Downstream: - **Revenue Hoshin Kanri — X-Matrix** (`revenue-hoshin-kanri`) — What VP Sales actually sees week over week at the top tier is the real-world check on whether the annual Hoshin's strategies are moving its metrics, not just a forecast of it. ## Where AI helps Judgement — stays with you: - Deciding who's actually the right owner to run a given tier's huddle - Deciding whether a drafted escalation condition is realistic given how the sales org actually works Analysis — AI helps: - Drafting each tier's review categories and a concrete escalation condition from a rough description of what it watches - Drafting the narrative from the ladder actually built Drudgery — automated: - Counting how many tiers have a named owner - Identifying which tiers are still unassigned - Exporting to xlsx in the house format --- Pipeline management board is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Attribution: Katafacts (katafacts.com). ## Using this skill Apply this method as part of whatever broader task, instructions, or deliverable you're already working on -- it's a method to use, not a standalone conversation to start. There is no generation tool for this catalogue yet, so draft the artifact's actual content yourself, following the fields above, the same way a person filling this out by hand would. The canonical guide page and a downloadable worked example (.xlsx) are at https://www.katafacts.com/katas/pipeline-management-board.