The cycle on one page. The rituals. The maturity model. A week-by-week walk through your first cycle. Read the methodology to understand why; read this to understand how.
Eight beats. Each beat names what the team is doing, what AI is doing, and what gets produced.
Team: drop Inputs into the Field: call notes, decision memos, tickets, research, interviews.
AI: ingests, structures, deduplicates.
Produces: Inputs · classified, indexed, searchable.
Team: promote Seedlings, demote weak claims, ask for re-cites.
AI: proposes Nutrients and Seedlings from Inputs; attaches the evidence trail.
Produces: Nutrients, Seedlings · Seeds when evidence supports.
Team: Select a Seed, the recommendation the team commits to growing.
AI: drafts the Grow Plan, inheriting Soil + the evidence trail.
Produces: a Grow Plan · context, Constraints, Tasks, Measures.
Team: review draft Tasks; steer the build.
AI: Tasks handed to Claude Code, Lovable, Cursor or your own agent. Growth comes back with trail attached.
Produces: Growth · built product change.
Team: decide what to Prune, what to ship.
AI: compares Growth against the Seed and Soil it should honour; flags drift, missed Constraints, weak spots.
Produces: Assay Report · Pruning recommendations.
Team: shape and approve the launch artefacts.
AI: drafts the Sheaf, the nine audience-specific artefacts a Harvest needs.
Produces: a Sheaf, audience-grouped.
Team: call whether the Yield is honest; identify gaps.
AI: reads metrics against the Measures set in the Grow Plan.
Produces: Yield Report · expected vs. actual.
Team: Turn the Soil, fold Gleanings back into the strategic context.
AI: gathers post-Harvest feedback, surfaces the surprises.
Produces: Gleanings · next-cycle Seeds.
Three named meetings a Cultivating team holds. Each replaces one ceremony most teams are doing badly anyway. None are mandatory; all tend to emerge after the second cycle.
The team reads the week's Inputs together. Decide what becomes a Nutrient. Promote or demote Seedlings against last week's set. Replaces the standing “research review.”
The team reviews the Seed slate, reads the evidence trail on each, and selects the one (rarely two) Seeds to Plant this cycle. Replaces the prioritisation meeting where nobody had context.
The team reads the Yield Report, looks at Gleanings, and Turns the Soil. The output is a list of revisions to Soil and a fresh Seed slate. Replaces the retrospective and the launch post-mortem in one.
Five stages, in plain language. Use this as a diagnostic: where is our team today, where would we like to be in two cycles, and what is in the way?
Ships from a backlog. Evidence is anecdotal.
Has a Field. Captures evidence. Produces Seeds.
Measures set before the Harvest. Yield read honestly.
Runs the full eight beats. Learnings feed the next cycle.
AI handles synthesis at every beat. Humans hold every cultivation moment.
Stage 5 is a direction, not a claim. Assay, Tally and Glean are growing: the destination is real, the road is partly built.
Four weeks. Not prescriptive (a Field can run a cycle in a day or a quarter) but this is the shape most beta teams found.
Two to four hours, once. Fill in Proposition, Market, Lifecycle, Constraints, Vision. Connect Inputs sources: your call recorder, your decision-log, your ticket tracker. Drop in last quarter's research.
Winnow proposes Nutrients and Seedlings from the Inputs. The team holds a Signal review: promote, demote, re-cite. By end of week, there should be a Seed slate with an evidence trail on each.
Seed evaluation meeting: pick one Seed (rarely two). Flourish drafts the Grow Plan with Tasks and Measures inherited from Soil. Hand off to your AI builder (or your humans) and let the work begin.
Growth comes back, Assay inspects, the team Prunes. Bushel drafts the Sheaf. The team shapes audience-specific artefacts. The Harvest is scheduled with expected Yield locked in.
Ship the Sheaf. Tally reads the Yield against the Measures. Glean gathers what comes back: the surprises, the confirmations, the misses. Hold the Harvest review. Turn the Soil. The next cycle starts from a wiser Field.
The surviving cultivation vocabulary, each term with its plain-English gloss. v1 terms that were cut (Furrows, Sunline, Aftergrowth, Regather) are not listed; they are no longer canonical.
Closed beta. One cycle is enough to know whether the cultivation model is the right shape for your team.