Transition
A transition is the move a user makes from one situation to another. Someone with a Stripe account that hasn't been reconciled in three months is moving toward "the books match the bank"; that's the transition, whether they hire a bookkeeper, do it in QuickBooks, or sit down with a spreadsheet on a Sunday. A product is one of several things they might pull on to make the move; the transition itself belongs to the user.
Definition
Movement from one state to another state, along a timeline. The unit of activity in a sequence of change.
Endpoints and activity
A transition has two endpoints: a starting state (where the user is when the transition begins) and a resulting state (where the user is when it ends, defined by completion criteria). Both endpoints carry conditions — the specific material circumstances the user has, knows, and is positioned with at each end. The transition itself is the activity that gets the user from one to the other.
Users supply the directional pull. They show up oriented toward a sought state they want, from a now-state they don't. Starting and resulting states are structural endpoints; intent is what moves the user between them.
Way and difference
Every transition is regardable under two aspects. The way summarizes the transition by what's being done — the activity, the process. "Grilling," "making pancakes," "completing a first workout." The difference summarizes the transition by what's different between its endpoints — the condition-deltas across starting and resulting states. "Raw to cooked," "no projects set up to first project organized and visible."
Way and difference aren't two objects; they're two aspects of one transition. The analyst toggles between them depending on what's being surfaced. Ways are what qualitative investigation clusters to find. Differences are the full set of condition-deltas across endpoints; completion criteria are the Essential-tier subset of those — the conditions verification operates against.
The framework's unit of analysis
The framework's analytical unit is the transition — the move from starting state to resulting state. Stage-based framings (funnels, journey maps, AARRR) use a different unit: stages along a provider-built infrastructure pipeline, with the work being to move users from one stage to the next. Transition framing treats users as arriving in a starting state they don't like, pulled toward a resulting state they want; the offering is one affordance among several they use to make the move.
The choice of unit ripples through everything downstream. Completion criteria, critical route, intent, value milestones, and paths all operate on transitions as specified. Selecting the wrong unit produces measurements and interventions that look correct within the wrong frame.
Example
In activation, the transition runs from "user just signed up, has a problem they want solved but hasn't tried anything in the offering yet" to "user has done what their intent brought them to the offering for, in a way they recognize as valuable." For a project management tool, the resulting state might be "first project organized with tasks visibly moving." For an invoicing app, "first invoice sent to a real client."
The transition is the activity in between. The signup cohort is the population entering it. First paid conversion is a commercial outcome that lags the transition. Value milestones are behavioral proxies within the transition that correlate with the resulting state being reached.