A room for Service and platform teams

A Friendly Front Door for Requests

Help requesters explain what they need while making tradeoffs visible.

Why this might help

When someone needs something from your team, the first conversation can get messy fast. People skip details, forget to mention deadlines, or don't realize they're asking for something huge. A request welcome card gives every new request a friendly front door. It asks the right questions upfront so your team understands what's needed, how urgent it is, and what tradeoffs are involved. Think of it like a short intake form at a doctor's office — it helps everyone before the real work begins.

Does this feel familiar?

  • A teammate sends a quick message asking for 'a small change' that turns out to need three people and two weeks.
  • Your team keeps getting surprised by urgent requests that were actually sitting in someone's inbox for days.
  • Two people on your team start working on the same request because nobody knew the other had picked it up.
  • A requester gets frustrated because they thought their ask was simple, but your team needed five follow-up questions before starting.

Try this together

  1. Put the welcome card somewhere obvious — a shared channel, a pinned doc, or a simple form — so requesters find it before they ping anyone directly.
  2. Ask for one sentence about the goal, not just the task. 'We need a banner' is less useful than 'We need a banner so new visitors understand what we do.'
  3. Include a rough size question, like 'Does this feel like an hour, a day, or a week to you?' It surfaces mismatches early and starts a real conversation.
  4. Let requesters flag their preferred deadline and then show them your team's current load so they can see why timing matters.
  5. Review new cards together once a week as a team — even for five minutes — so nothing sits unread and everyone knows what's coming.

Request Welcome Card

  1. Open a new request welcome card and give it a clear name that matches what the requester is asking for.
  2. Fill in the Brief field with the requester's goal in their own words — copy their message if you need to, then clean it up together.
  3. Add the requester and any team members who need to see this card to the People field so everyone's in the loop from the start.
  4. Attach any files, links, or reference materials the requester shared so the context stays with the card and doesn't get lost in a chat thread.
  5. Set a schedule or target date on the card, then share it with the requester so they can see it's been received and placed in your team's view.

Questions worth talking about

When a request comes in without enough detail, who usually ends up chasing the missing information — and how long does that take?

Have you ever started work on something and then found out the requester actually needed something different? What would have helped catch that earlier?

If a requester could see your team's schedule before they submitted their ask, do you think they'd adjust their expectations?

A few common questions

What if requesters don't want to fill out a form — they just want to send a message?

That's really common. You don't have to make it feel like a form. Some teams just share a short list of three questions in their reply: what's the goal, when do you need it, and what does success look like? The welcome card is a mindset as much as a tool.

How do we handle requests that are genuinely urgent and can't wait for a structured intake?

Urgent requests still benefit from a quick version of this. Even one sentence about the goal and a rough deadline helps your team triage faster. A short card created in the moment is better than a long conversation with no record. Speed and clarity aren't opposites.

Can Tindlo help us manage these request cards alongside our regular team schedule?

Yes, in a practical way. Tindlo lets you create work items with a Brief, People, Files, and Links attached, and place them on a shared Day or Week view. So a request card lives next to your team's other work on the same timeline, making it easier to see what fits and what doesn't.

Keep the story close to the schedule

A date makes more sense when you can also see the reason, the owner, and the work around it. Tindlo brings those pieces together when a calendar alone isn't enough.

See how Tindlo works →

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