Glossary — Startup OS docs

Term	Meaning
Adoption	Moving an Operations Instance to a new platform release. It arrives as a pull request you merge. See Staying current.
Autonomy level	How far Startup OS may go on its own for a class of decision, from L0 (observe and report) to L4 (act within an explicit budget). New products run at L1. See Decision rights and autonomy.
Board-only	A permission value meaning you decide. Startup OS may propose with evidence, and no autonomy level ever grants it.
Cadence	How often a kind of work recurs: daily, weekly, or quarterly.
Declination	A step’s decision not to proceed, with its reason. A valid result, not a failure.
Discovery	Reading your connected organizations to find products and say how each is set up. It writes nothing.
Escalation	A decision Startup OS brings to you because it is not Startup OS’s to make. Filed as an issue labelled `escalation`. Silence is never taken as approval.
Manifest	`STARTUP-OS.yaml`, the file that declares a product’s identity, repositories, permissions, and governance. Read from the default branch only.
Operating loop	The recurring cycle that observes, decides, proposes, and checks: observe, understand, research, review, decide, plan, act, verify, learn. See The operating loop.
Operating mode	Observe, Prepare, Operate, Paused, or Archived. Worked out from a product’s permissions, never set directly. See Operating modes.
Operations Instance	The repository named `operations` that holds everything Startup OS knows about a product. See The Operations Instance.
Permission	One entry under `capabilities` in the manifest, saying whether Startup OS may take one kind of action. See Permissions and operating modes.
Preparatory permission	One of the seven permissions whose effects stay inside your repositories or organization: issues, comments, branches, labels, projects, pull requests, and workflows.
Procedure	A multi-step workflow with a cadence, such as the weekly business review. See Skills.
Run key	The name of one run’s folder under `runs/`: the product and the ISO week.
Skill	A reusable method for a bounded task that needs judgment, such as a pricing review. See Skills.
Stage	Where the business is: pre-revenue, finding fit, scaling, mature, or winding down. It decides which questions are worth asking.
Turn	One scheduled run of one step or procedure, started by the schedule in `config/schedule.json`.
Workspace	In the dashboard, a group of products you operate together. One workspace can span several GitHub organizations.

Go-to-market terms

Term	Meaning
GTM thesis	A source-backed, versioned account of who buys, why, and how the business reaches value. An exact founder decision accepts it.
Motion	One coherent route from a defined customer need through acquisition, useful value and commercial outcomes. Its journey belongs to the product.
Motion maturity	Discover, validate, convert, retain or scale. Distinct from whether the motion is proposed, active, paused or retired.
Registered experiment	A test whose definition and boundaries were committed before start. Registration alone permits no external action.
Successor experiment	A new test identity that modifies a prior registered design while retaining the original.
Review outcome	A structured proposed choice tied to evidence and current state, applied through a complete reviewed decision/state bundle.
Execution receipt	A record of transport or an attempted action. It is separate from independent customer-outcome evidence.

See Go-to-market workflow.