What is a front door?
The thin orchestrator that routes work to roles and verifies what comes back.
Definition
front door (n.) – the single entry point that knows what the company is, which roles exist, where their folders live, and what the standing policy is, and which routes work to those roles rather than performing the work itself.
Every company operated this way has one document that gets read first. It states the business, the constraints, the roles and their locations, and the rules that hold regardless of which role is acting. Work arrives at the front door, the front door decides which role owns it, and the role's own folder supplies the craft.
The discipline is that the front door stays thin. It is a router and a policy layer, not a place where craft accumulates. The moment it starts holding how-to knowledge it becomes the bottleneck that the roles were supposed to remove, and every change to any role has to pass through it.
A useful check: if the front door is growing faster than the roles beneath it, work is being pulled up into it that belongs in a brain repo.
The front door also owns verification. It is the layer that checks a result came back correct, which is different from checking that a step ran.
Why thin is the whole point
A thick front door recreates the org chart problem it was meant to solve. Everything routes through one place, that place becomes the constraint, and the roles below it degrade into ticket queues. Keeping it thin means a role can be improved, replaced, or paused without touching the router.
Thin does not mean short. A front door can be long and still be thin, because length spent on policy and pointers is different from length spent on craft.
What belongs in it
The identity of the business and the constraints that never move. The registry of roles and where their folders are. The standing rules that apply to every role, including the ones about money, access, and what must never happen without a human. A pointer to the current state of the work, so a fresh session can find out where things stand without being told.
What does not belong in it: how to write an ad, how to close a month, how to run a campaign. Those live with the role that owns them.