A worked example · Harbor is fictional
Nobody should have to ask what happened overnight.
Harbor is the board a duty manager opens at six, before anyone asks them anything. It holds what deviated overnight, what was decided about it, and who owns the next step — so the morning starts from a read rather than a Slack scroll.
The one measure
Share of morning standups that start from Harbor rather than a Slack scroll. If the board is not the first thing opened, it is a second place to look — which is worse than none.
61%
from 24% in May
Waiting on a person
2 proposals · nothing enters memory unaccepted
- contradicts a decisionharbor/board#pr-402
PR #402 adds an out-of-hours digest email
"Nothing in Harbor pages anyone" was decided 7 months ago. #402 sends a 02:00 digest to duty managers — arguably not a page, arguably exactly one.
- contradicts a decisionharbor/board#pr-407
PR #407 writes exception status back to the WMS
"No write-back to the WMS" was decided 4 months ago to keep Harbor removable. #407 adds a status write on close, described in the PR as "read-only in spirit".
- undecided
Whether night shift edits belong to the day they happened or the day they close
Operating day and calendar day disagree for six hours every night. Whichever we pick, one of the board and the export is going to be surprising, and we have not chosen which audience absorbs it.
What it is betting on
Each one is falsifiable, and the evidence line is counted from the records that cite it.
Bet 01
The six o'clock read
holdingThe board's job is one screen a duty manager reads before standup, not a dashboard they explore.
Every ops tool we replaced was built for investigation, and investigation is a thing you do about four times a month. The daily act is being briefed. Optimising for the briefing means most of the product is what we refuse to show.
What would change our mind
Duty managers keep opening the WMS first, or the median session runs past two minutes — either would say they are investigating here rather than being briefed, and the whole shape is wrong.
2 decisions
Bet 02
Exceptions, not inventory
testingShowing only what deviated beats showing everything.
A full manifest is easy to build and impossible to read at six in the morning. If the board only shows what broke, the empty state is the good news — and an empty board becomes a fact worth trusting rather than a screen that failed to load.
What would change our mind
Teams ask for the full manifest back, or they switch to 'show all' more often than they act on an exception. Either means we are hiding things people need, and the filter is doing the work the product claimed to do.
2 decisions
Bet 03
Write it where it happened
testingA note belongs on the shipment it is about, not in a separate incident log.
Incident logs are written for the person who writes them. Attaching the note to the shipment means the next person to touch it finds the context without knowing an incident existed.
What would change our mind
Notes keep landing in Slack first and arrive here by copy-paste, which would say the shipment is not where people think the story lives.
2 decisions
Bet 04
One board per region, not per site
earlySites in a region share one board rather than each running their own.
Most exceptions cross sites — a late inbound at one becomes a short outbound at the next. Per-site boards make each one locally tidy and regionally blind, which is the failure the whole product exists to fix.
What would change our mind
Sites route around it with their own spreadsheets, or cross-site noise pushes the six o'clock read past one screen. The first says the unit is wrong; the second says it is right and unworkable.
1 decision
What bit them once
5 rules
- critical
The WMS says delivered when it leaves the yard
The WMS delivery flag fires on yard departure, not on signature. Anything Harbor derives from it is a departure event wearing a delivery label — always cross-check the POD timestamp before telling anyone a shipment landed.
- critical
Carrier IDs repeat across regions
Carrier IDs are unique per region, not globally. Two regions can hold the same ID for different carriers, so any cross-region join must key on (region, carrier_id) or it will silently merge two companies.
- warn
Daylight saving moves the six o'clock cutoff twice a year
The overnight window is defined in local site time, so on the two DST changeover nights it is 23 or 25 hours long. Both are correct and both look like a bug in the counts. Do not 'fix' it by pinning to UTC — that breaks the read for every other night of the year.
- warn
Night shift edits land under the previous operating day
An edit at 01:40 attaches to the operating day that started the previous morning. The board renders this correctly; the CSV export does not, and a manager reconciling the two will find a discrepancy that is real in the export and imaginary on screen.
- warn
Read-only carrier links outlive the carrier relationship
A scoped link expires with its shipment, not with the carrier agreement. Offboarding a carrier does not revoke links already issued, so anything in flight stays readable until it closes. Revoke explicitly if the offboarding is not amicable.
This page renders a fixture. Harbor is a fictional product and nothing here is connected to a repository, a database or a running agent. In Bluet, every one of these records would carry the pull request, thread or file it was drawn from.