# 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. 2. Identify the buyer goal, required outcome, included work, exclusions, acceptance criteria, dependencies, timeline, customer responsibilities, and implementation risks. 3. Reconcile available value evidence. Reuse it only when the use case and assumptions still match; otherwise identify what changed. Do not require a nonexistent analysis or invent an ROI claim. 4. Draft the customer proposal in plain language. Include objectives, scope, deliverables, timeline, roles, assumptions, fee and payment terms only when authorized, and a clear next step. 5. Draft an internal memo that records the pricing rationale, capacity, profitability or delivery concerns, evidence gaps, negotiation limits, and decisions needed. Never copy internal rates or margin logic into the customer-facing proposal. 6. For a revision, protect the existing text: preserve user-owned changes outside requested sections and surface any 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.
Output
Return a customer proposal and an internal decision memo, plus a concise list of assumptions, open questions, and approvals needed before delivery or send.
Boundaries
This method drafts. It does not send a proposal, alter contract language, create a customer record, approve a fee, or commit delivery resources.