The lifecycles you define

The pipeline and customer rails are Beacon’s own, and they are warranted by Beacon. They are not the only two a company runs. Hiring, implementation, partner onboarding, a fundraising process — each is a sequence of stages with a pace worth measuring, and each can be built as a lifecycle of your own.

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What a lifecycle is made of

One named thing binding four parts you already have: Four more are optional and off unless you switch them on: a link into the forecast, a forward-looking read, a control loop that drafts a corrective for a person to approve, and a reporting cadence. No new machinery is involved. A lifecycle is a named composition of parts Beacon already governs, which is why building one is safe rather than risky.

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The rule that decides whether yours is possible

Your object has to arrive at a countable grain. Requisitions, employees, contracts, projects — these are individual records, and they are fine. Raw event streams are not. Product telemetry, clickstream, commit history: these arrive in volumes that do not belong in the layer Beacon computes over, and they are admitted only as a summarised roll-up at a stated grain — usage per account per month, adoption per feature per cohort per month. If your lifecycle’s object cannot be expressed that way, it does not fit this runtime. Beacon will say so rather than accept it and degrade quietly.

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The lines it may not cross

• It never redefines a Beacon figure. Where a lifecycle’s score and a published figure could be confused, the published one is authoritative and labelled as such.
• A forward-looking read is a proposal, not a stored number. It is put to a person, who accepts or does not. It never becomes a value other figures read.
• It may not claim causation. A read that shows two things moving together says so; it may never be presented as one thing causing the other.
• It stops when a source stops. The lifecycle states which connections it needs. If one is missing, the affected stages drop into a named degraded mode rather than being computed from what is left.
• Writing back into your tools is off by default and switched on per lifecycle. Inside Beacon, everything a lifecycle produces is visible from the start.

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