# Proposal scoping
Turn incomplete commercial inputs into a customer-ready proposal and a separate internal decision memo. Keep confirmed facts separate from assumptions, and ask only questions that could change scope, timing, price, risk, or acceptance.
Classify the engagement
- **Fixed fee:** bounded deliverables, a completion point, and a handoff.
- **Retainer:** recurring service with a defined cadence, capacity, and review.
- **Revision:** an existing proposal whose user-owned wording must be preserved.
If the work could fit more than one model, ask whether it ends with a handoff or continues as an operating service. Do not blend fixed-fee and retainer structures without explaining the deliberate exception.
Workflow
1. Read the supplied discovery material, prior proposal, value analysis, and approved commercial terms. Record the source for material facts. For a revision, inspect the supplied version first and identify the requested sections before changing any wording. 2. Identify the buyer goal, required outcome, included work, exclusions, acceptance criteria, dependencies, timeline, customer responsibilities, and implementation risks. 3. Reconcile available value evidence. Decide whether to reuse it, adjust it, or obtain a new analysis because the use case or assumptions changed. Do not require a nonexistent analysis or invent an ROI claim. 4. Draft the internal commercial memo first, using `references/commercial-analysis.md`. It records the proposed commercial model, fee, client-paid pass-through costs, duration, effort, capacity, evidence gaps, negotiation limits, and delivery risks. Keep internal rates, effort-margin reasoning, and accounting-margin reasoning out of customer copy. 5. Present the proposed model, scope, fee and pass-through treatment, value evidence disposition, and material risks for confirmation before preparing customer-facing and internal artifacts, unless the user has already clearly authorized drafting on those terms. 6. Draft the customer proposal in plain language. Use `references/fixed-fee-proposal.md` for a fixed-fee engagement and `references/retainer-proposal.md` for a retainer. Include only authorized fee and payment terms, and distinguish included work from unselected work. 7. For a revision, make only the requested local changes, reread the complete result, and confirm the final diff preserves user-owned wording outside the requested sections. Surface a conflict rather than regenerating the whole document.
Quality rules
- Treat a revenue or savings claim as a hypothesis unless supported by evidence. - Define observable acceptance rather than promising an outcome outside the team's control. - Never promise unlimited work for a bounded capacity. - Do not invent a fee, discount, authority, contractual term, or customer approval. - Cite each external factual claim beside the claim and include a Sources list; re-check each URL-to-claim pairing before finalizing.
Output
Return a customer proposal and an internal decision memo, plus assumptions, open questions, and approvals needed before delivery or send. The internal memo must state the commercial recommendation and rationale, including a concrete response when the proposed fee cannot support the required work (reduce scope, change the model, obtain approval for a different fee, or decline the work).
Boundaries
This method drafts. It does not send a proposal, alter contract language, create a customer record, approve a fee, or commit delivery resources.