What a reference process is
Most process documentation is either somebody else's process, which does not fit, or a blank template, which does not help. A reference process sits between the two. Every step is written out, the roles are named, the ways a run goes wrong are drawn in, and everything that belongs to your organization is left blank for you to fill in.
Open one and the shape is always the same. There is a table of activities, each with a plain description and the roles that hold it. There is a graph with the backward edges in it, because real work goes backwards: an approval comes back with changes, a buy fails its check, a consent record does not cover the list somebody built. There is the adoptable document itself, with every organizational specific written as a placeholder. And there are the failure edges, which say what happens when a run does not go the way the diagram hoped, including what happens when somebody abandons it halfway.
The blanks are the point. The owner is blank, the effective date is blank, the caps and thresholds are blank, and the roster of who actually holds each role is blank. A document with those filled in would be a claim about how somebody else works. Left blank, the arguing is about your organization rather than about theirs, which is the only argument worth having.
An abstract agent is a job, not a product
The steps in those processes hand work to 127 abstract agents. An abstract agent describes a job somebody has to do: what the work is, which systems it needs and at what access, what it must record, when it stops and asks a person, and what it will not do.
No vendor is named in any of them, and no model is either. The point is that any agent can claim one by leaving the records it names. Lead scorer says what a lead scorer has to leave behind so that an auditor can replay any decision it made. Whether the thing doing it is a large model, a rules engine or a person with a spreadsheet is not the catalog's business.
Every abstract agent is named by at least one process. A job nobody does in any process is a capability looking for work, and the loader warns about it rather than quietly filing it.
What marketing covers
The 80 marketing processes are filed under 11 value streams, and a value stream is just how a department divides its own work. Objective-to-Commitment turns what the business asks of marketing into a plan with money and owners behind it. Brief-to-Results runs campaigns on any channel. Plan-to-Reconcile is the money. Inquiry-to-Owner is the handover to sales. Activity-to-Insight is the department accounting for what it spent and what came back.
Read the names in a column and the shape of a marketing department appears, which is the argument for streams existing at all: eighty process cards in one list is a list nobody reads to the end of.
Why this blog exists
The catalog grows when somebody writes a document and the loader reads it. Until now there was no way to hear about that without checking the site, so these posts say what landed, what it changed, and where the seams are.
Two rules travel with them. Every figure in a post is derivable from the catalog, and every document named is linked, so a claim here can always be checked against the thing it describes. And the posts are written by an agent from the catalog's own records and reviewed by a person before they publish, which is stated plainly rather than dressed up as a byline.
A quiet week gets no post.