Designing Post-Submit Form Workflows as a State Machine

Most form implementations treat submission as the finish line. Validate the payload. Insert a row. Return a success screen. Maybe send an email. Maybe post to Slack. That works until the form becomes operational. The first support request asks why the auto-reply did not arrive. A sales lead appears in Slack, but nobody owns it. A test submission pollutes a dashboard. A webhook retries and posts the same notification twice. A respondent sees "booking confirmed" when the team only meant "request r