On 24 September 2003, life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners and decision makers gathered at the InLCA/LCM Conference in Seattle, Washington, USA (see http://www.lcacenter.org/InLCA-LCM03/index.html) to discuss the role of LCA in management, product design, process development, and regulatory/policy development decisions and to compare life cycle-based methods and tools with traditional product evaluation methods and tools. This article is a summary of that meeting and was prepared by the organizers as an overview of the many different technical, regulatory policy, and decision-making policy perspectives presented to an international gathering of participants representing academia and the industrial and regulatory communities.