War-game a lead routing rule by testing whether assignment logic, SLA clocks, and exception paths still protect pipeline quality when volume spikes and reps argue over ownership.
Routing rules fail when "qualified" is undefined, when exceptions dual-count the same lead as owned and as open, and when reassignment drills live only as a promise. The review needs one written definition of an allowed assignment, one owner who can deny a bypass, and a documented consequence when a lead sits past SLA without a human.
Freeze the routing proposal
Write the match fields, territory map, round-robin or account-based logic, required evidence, approvers, and SLA clocks. Attach the last five routing disputes with outcomes and any customer-visible impact. Identify exclusions in plain language. If a class of lead is omitted from the rule, show how that omission affects risk rather than leaving it as a footnote.
Name the approval choice and the conditions that force a hold. Include the CRM fields that compute eligibility so two reviewers can reproduce the same owner label from the same packet.
Seat the rule from both sides
- Sales manager
- Defends why the new matching protects quota and what harm a delay would cause.
- Demand gen lead
- Challenges volume assumptions, source quality, and whether the rule reuses an untested path.
- GTM ops lead
- Tests field identity, automation order, and whether the rule bypasses required hygiene checks.
- RevOps lead
- Checks whether reporting and forecast objects still match the claimed owners.
- Skeptic
- Finds the strongest fairness claim with the weakest assignment evidence.
Run pressure cases on the routing form
Use Pingpong to walk through a near-miss "strategic account" override, a partner-sourced lead that collides with a named territory, a form fill that arrives mid-reorg, and a request to waive the SLA clock because the CRM already looked green. For each case, start from the documented rule language. Ask who can expand ownership and which evidence is required to reverse a deny. Any step that depends on an unnamed person becomes a routing condition.
Ask the room to replay one historical dispute under the proposed rules. If the historical case would have assigned while later forcing a quiet reassignment, revise the rule before treating it as standard.
Compare the proposal with the GTM ops lead seat and an attribution model change stress test. If territory design is unclear, review a territory design review. More operating decisions live in the war-game decisions hub.
Publish the routing path only after a dry run can reproduce the same owner label from the stored CRM fields without manual reinterpretation.