Scoped transition
A scoped transition is a transition the team has picked out, named, and pinned to a particular scale so it becomes something they can actually work with. People are moving through transitions in their lives constantly; only a handful get formalized this way. Scoping is what turns a transition from a fact about the user into a concrete object on the team's desk: something to plan around, measure against, and break into smaller pieces.
Definition
A scoped transition is a transition that has been committed to as a framework object — named, scope-selected per transition scoping, and made eligible for downstream operations like completion-criteria specification, value milestone anchoring, and decomposition into sub-transitions.
Generic transitions become framework objects
Transitions are everywhere in a user's interaction with an offering — signing up, completing a first task, paying for the first time, recovering from a billing failure. These exist in the user's world whether or not anyone in the framework names them. They are generic transitions: shifts in the user's state with starting conditions and resulting conditions, but uncommitted to as analytical objects.
A scoped transition is what you get when an analyst commits to one of these as a unit of analysis. The commitment has two parts: a name (the way and/or difference the transition is being summarized under) and a scope-level (the altitude on the stack at which the transition is being held). That commitment turns the transition from something happening in the user's world into something the framework can run apparatus on.
What scoping commits to
A given user activity admits multiple scope-levels. The same underlying behavior can be scoped as "user enters payment info," "user converts to paid," "user becomes a sustaining customer," or "user adopts the offering as their primary tool" — each is a legitimate scoped transition over the same material, but each commits to different starting conditions, different resulting conditions, and different sub-transition structure underneath. Altitude has to serve the downstream apparatus the scoping is for: intent detection wants one altitude, completion-criteria work wants another, commercial-application scoping wants a third. Choosing scope arbitrarily produces names that are valid-as-scoped-transitions but downstream-useless.
The scoped name is then subject to two constraints. Scope fidelity requires the name to compress the underlying difference-structure honestly — claiming no more and no less than the material supports. The hot-air diagnostic tests whether the name has specifiable difference-structure underneath it at all; a name sustained by convention rather than structure fails to anchor framework work and isn't usable as a scoped transition.
What scoped status enables
Only scoped transitions are eligible for the framework's downstream operations. Completion criteria — the IF-conditions of the resulting state — can only be specified once a transition has been scope-selected; without a committed scope-level, "what counts as complete" has no referent. The same holds for condition tiering (sorting characteristics into Essential / Expected / Related), for critical route construction, and for milestone-anchoring (value milestones hang inside scoped transitions, not floating in the user's life). The scoped transition is the substrate every downstream operation requires.
Example
An activation team studying their signup cohort might initially talk about "users activating" — a generic phrase pointing at no specific transition. Scoping that into a framework object means committing to something concrete: starting state = signup event, resulting state = first paid conversion, with the transition held at that altitude.
That commitment is what lets the team specify completion criteria (what conditions hold at first paid conversion that distinguish sustaining customers from one-payment-then-churn), decompose the transition into sub-transitions (onboarding, first successful workflow, perceived-fit decision), and anchor value milestones at the sub-transition resulting states. "Users activating" can't carry any of that apparatus; "signup → first paid conversion at activation-team altitude" can.