Pipeline
A board is a promise about what the columns mean.
Most boards break that promise in the same way: somebody drags a card into Closed Won, nothing is asked, and the reason for a loss becomes whatever fits in a note field afterwards.
The shape of the board here is what stops that, and it holds on a board you rearranged yourself.
Shape
Working stages are columns. Endings are actions.
A stage carries a name, an order and its own probability. Any stage that is not an ending is a column on the board. Any stage that is one — won, lost, abandoned — is not draggable at all, and the refusal says so by name.
The rule generalises, which is the point. Build a fourteen-stage pipeline for enterprise and a three-stage one for renewals; mark whichever stages are endings. The board takes the right shape and closing still goes through the path that asks why.
Drag a deal onto an ending and it is refused, by name: use win, lose or abandon. Which means a close always went through the path that asks why — on a board you rearranged yourself, with stages we have never seen.
- A pipeline in use will not be deleted —
And the refusal counts: forty-seven deals still reference it. The default pipeline cannot be deleted at all until another is made the default.
- A stage in use behaves the same way —
With the same count. You are told what is in the way rather than being offered a cascade that quietly moves deals somewhere.
- Moving stage takes the stage's probability —
Forward or backward, overwriting what was there. A hand-tuned probability does not survive the next move — worth knowing before a team starts tuning them.
Several pipelines
New business and renewals should not share a shape.
They have different stages, different probabilities and different meanings for the word qualified. So they are different pipelines, and the board's stage filter and the forecast both follow whichever one a deal belongs to.
›Can a deal move from one pipeline to another?
No. A stage belonging to a different pipeline is refused by name, and the edit form has no pipeline field. Today the only route is to recreate the deal. If you are planning to split one pipeline into two, plan that migration before you split rather than after.
›Can a pipeline be restricted to one team?
No. A pipeline has a name, a description, a default flag and an active flag. There is no visibility control on it.
›Is there a record of how long deals spend in each stage?
Every stage change is recorded, with how long the deal had been in the stage it left and the probability at the time — and nothing reads it back today. There is no time-in-stage report, no velocity report and no stage-conversion report. The data is accumulating; the screen that reads it is not built. We would rather say that than let you discover it in a quarterly review.
›What happens to a deal when its stage is deleted?
It cannot be. You are told how many deals are in the way and asked to move them first.
Per stage
Each stage can ask for something before a deal leaves it.
Configured by you, stage by stage — which fields must be filled and which artefacts must exist. That is its own page, because the interesting part is not the checklist but what happens when somebody needs to move a deal anyway.
What a stage asks for, and what happens when it is not met
Forced through with a written reason, or refused outright — your choice, per stage.