Cadence next-season build commit is stuck between Sales's case for max capacity to protect ~$30M in peak-season bookings and Operations's 9-week finished-goods build with a non-reversible July-1 capacity cutoff. The room converged on a 70/30 staged commit with an 8-week pre-production gate and stepped pull-down, but the deal is not signable until Finance authorizes the $1-2M option premium, the CM stamps the Q+2 confirmation date, and Sales/Operations ratify the trigger thresholds. The single decision the meeting must make: green-light the 70/30 staged structure and lock the three contingent sign-offs before July 1.
Sales moved from full-max to 70/30 counter; Operations accepted the 70/30 structure and the stepped (not binary) pull-down in the final round.
Ops (Dana Reyes, high confidence); re-confirmed in negotiation as the reason the trigger design matters.
Ops flagged it as the reconciliation that has to happen; Sales corroborated that 'selling everything we make' does not square with 9 weeks FG and port backlog.
WOS ≥11 OR sell-through <85% → pull Q+2 down; WOS ≤7 AND conversion >65% for ≥3 weeks → push Q+2 up; stepped 15/15 release (Ops' proposal, explicitly not drawn from records).
Accepted structure subject to Finance sign-off and stamped date; willing to override numbers inside either trigger but has not yet named an alternative.
What we need to decide together: Which WOS, sell-through, and conversion numbers get ratified — and whether the pull-down stays stepped 15/15 or changes — in a 48-hour validation window with Finance present.
Cost of being short is bigger than cost of being long; peak-season stockout puts ~$30M of bookings at risk and waitlist buyers defect to competitors.
Full max commit ties up ~$40M in working capital for ~two quarters (25-30% of output unsold), plus resale-price erosion on a $2,000+ premium product; both figures explicitly not Finance-validated.
What we need to decide together: Whether the staged 70/30 with $1-2M option premium is the right hedge between these two error costs — and which Finance owner signs the working-capital exposure off.
Operations has '~8 weeks before Q+2 production, directionally mid-Q+1' but no stamped date; without it the gate is not enforceable and the July-1 countdown starts eating the runway.
The premium figure is unvalidated and depends on an unverified $50M block size; Finance cannot authorize the spend line without the block size confirmed.
Marketing (Elena Ruiz, high confidence) explicitly flagged that nobody owns the read on what happens to resale pricing on a $2,195 premium product if units sit; a brand-risk input is missing from the build-vs-stockout decision.
Even if the 70/30 staged path is executed cleanly, a partial overbuild on a $2,195 premium product is not just a working-capital issue — it is a multi-year brand and pricing-power issue nobody has sized.
The 70/30 triggers are the proposed answer to this, but until D4 is ratified the early-warning system is unratified — the structure only works if the triggers actually fire in time.
↳ added to the decisions as D4
$8M campaign is already committed (media booked, hero film locked, influencers signed, mostly non-refundable), and there is no contingency plan that protects the premium narrative if the waitlist converts slower than 20% QoQ assumes.
Start with D3 (Finance authorization of the $1-2M premium and rejection of the $40M exposure) — it is the cheapest sign-off to land and unblocks the structure; chase D2 (CM-stamped date) in parallel because that is the slowest path against the July-1 cutoff. Hold the room for D4/D5 trigger ratification inside the 48-hour window.