Ask the next missing question
When a request cannot yet be evaluated, ask for the specific missing information instead of returning a generic rejection.
Difficulty Moderate
Idea Catalogue
Ideas for better demand-driven commerce
A growing set of practical ideas for specification journeys, product information, capability, constraints and commercial improvement.
Each entry states a commercial problem, how to address it, what could go wrong, and what you would have to measure to know whether it worked. These are published in full. They are a selection from a larger catalogue, and the rest is shared with customers or kept internal.
Nothing here is presented as a proven result. Every idea carries a label saying how well supported it actually is, and the strongest of those labels is not currently in use by anything.
What is published here
This is a selection, not the whole catalogue
The ideas below are published in full and are meant to be usable exactly as written. They are not everything Specify has recorded.
Published
What is on this page. Chosen because it holds up without knowing anything about your business, and because publishing it costs nothing we are not willing to give away.
Shared with customers
A larger set, including entries that only make sense against a specific catalogue, capability model or constraint set. Shared during an engagement or with businesses on the platform.
Internal
Everything, including commercially sensitive material, ideas that are really product direction, and open questions we have not resolved well enough to hand to anybody.
The distinction is worth stating plainly rather than implying that twelve entries are the sum of the work.
How to read these
Every idea says how well supported it is
The label is the most important field on each entry. It is also the one most catalogues leave out, which is why they all read as equally confident.
- Established practice
- Widely and independently practised across commerce. Nothing here is a Specify discovery; these are the ideas most likely to be uncontroversial and least likely to be exciting.
- Context-dependent
- The reasoning is sound and the outcome genuinely depends on your business, your customers and your production. Worth testing rather than adopting wholesale.
- Hypothesis
- Specify's argument, untested by us or anyone else we can cite. Treat it as a position somebody should try to falsify.
- Exploratory
- We understand the shape of the problem and not the answer. Included because naming an open question is more useful than pretending it is closed.
Difficulty is an initial editorial assessment of how much work an idea usually takes, not a guaranteed estimate for your systems. A change that is small in one storefront can be significant in another because of where the data lives.
12 ideas
Showing 12 ideas.
Capture no-result demand
Record what the customer was trying to find when search, filters or configuration produced no valid result.
Difficulty Small
Show capability beyond published products
Give customers whose requirement may be deliverable a route forward, even when no exact product exists.
Difficulty Significant
Explain which options affect delivery
Expose the dimensions, materials or choices that materially change the lead time, at the point the choice is made.
Difficulty Moderate
Separate possible from approved
Make it explicit when an outcome is technically plausible but still requires human review or commercial approval.
Difficulty Moderate
Turn repeated questions into product information
Use recurring customer enquiries to identify the specifications, guidance, imagery and answers the product pages are missing.
Difficulty Small
Show acceptable alternatives
When an exact result is impossible, explain which requirement could change and what becomes available if it does.
Difficulty Moderate
Record the reason for rejection
When a request is refused, record the governing constraint, so repeated unmet demand becomes visible instead of anecdotal.
Difficulty Moderate
Prepare experiments from audit findings
Convert an observed problem into a hypothesis, a proposed change, a metric and a review, before anybody builds anything.
Difficulty Moderate
Design for specification abandonment
Find the question or stage where customers stop, and establish whether it is unclear, premature, intrusive or simply unnecessary.
Difficulty Small
Make product imagery answer a question
Choose and commission images based on what customers need to understand, rather than on what photographs well.
Difficulty Depends on systems
Bring constraints into the customer journey
Communicate meaningful limitations early enough to prevent a false expectation, without burying the customer in caveats.
Difficulty Moderate
Where the ideas come from
An idea is not the end of the process
The catalogue is the written output of a cycle that runs continuously, and entries change as the later stages produce evidence.
An idea
A merchant's actual context
Consulting or implementation
An experiment or an observation
Recorded learning
A refined idea, or a platform standard
An entry that has been through the whole cycle would carry a stronger evidence label and a citation. None of them have yet, which is why none of them do.
From idea to implementation
An idea is not a plan for your business
Everything above is written to be general, which is exactly what makes it insufficient on its own. What an idea is worth depends on your catalogue, your production constraints, who has authority to approve what, and which of these problems you actually have. Consulting is where an idea is tested against those facts and turned into something specific: an investigation, a capability model, a built component or integration, a governance decision, or the conclusion that it does not apply to you.
Start with evidence
Or start with one of your own enquiries
The complimentary Enquiry Audit takes one real customer enquiry and shows what a structured reading of it produces. It runs on this site and costs nothing.