How we decide what to build

Honestly: one person decides, once a week, with a hard time limit. Knowing that is more useful than a process diagram.

The inputs

• How many people hit it. Votes and duplicates, which is why upvoting an existing post beats filing a new one.
• Whether it blocks real work or is a preference. A bug that loses work outranks everything.
• Whether it contradicts a locked decision. Some of TOVIO's behaviour is settled in a decision record. Changing it means superseding that record, which is deliberate and slow.
• What design partners are blocked on. Partners post on a segmented board, and their blockers are weighted heavily during triage.

The order the weekly block runs in

The block has a fixed priority order, and it is the honest answer to "why has nobody replied yet". The moderation queue is cleared first, because an unapproved post is invisible and an unmoderated one can be a disclosure. Then triage — where a design-partner blocker is weighted above a public feature request — then the sweep of posts that have gone quiet, then the design-partner ticket channel. If the time runs out, the later blocks wait; the earlier ones do not.

Why some answers are slow

Triage happens in that one weekly block. If your post arrives just after it, it waits. That is the cost of a project run by one person, and we would rather say so than publish a response target we cannot hold. There is none — not for public posts, not for design partners, not anywhere.

When the answer is no

A Not planned status always carries two things: the honest reason, and what would change our mind — a condition, or the decision record that would have to be superseded. If you get a "not planned" without those, that is a mistake on our side; reply and ask.

If the queue gets away from us

There is a written ladder of what gets dropped first when the time is not there, and it is applied deliberately rather than quietly — each rung is a recorded decision, and the last one is closing the channel outright rather than leaving a queue nobody is reading. Two things are never on it: the moderation queue, and telling you when something you asked for shipped.