Separate possible from approved
Make it explicit when an outcome is technically plausible but still requires human review or commercial approval.
- Evidence
- 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.
- Difficulty
- Moderate. 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.
The commercial problem
A system that can describe an outcome is easily mistaken for a system that has agreed to it. The failure is most acute with generated or configured responses, where fluency reads as authority and a plausible answer looks exactly like an approved one.
Why it matters
A business that cannot distinguish these two states in its own interface will eventually be held to something it never agreed to. The distinction costs almost nothing to express and is very expensive to omit.
Where it applies
- Any configurator that can produce a novel combination
- Generated or assisted responses to customer requirements
- Quotation and estimate flows
- Anywhere a price, a date or a technical feasibility is stated
Suggested implementation
- Give each outcome an explicit state: proposed, under review, or approved. Three states, not a confidence score.
- Use different visual and verbal treatment for each. A proposal should not look like a confirmation.
- Name who approves and what triggers escalation, before the interface can produce the state.
- Record the decision and its basis, so the answer can be explained later by someone who was not there.
Risks and constraints
- Over-labelling erodes the signal: if everything is provisional, nothing reads as reliable.
- An approval step with no owner and no service level becomes a queue where requests go to die.
- Customers may read 'requires approval' as 'probably no' unless the wording is handled carefully.
What to measure
- How many proposals reach an approval decision, and how long that takes
- Disputes or escalations arising from a customer believing something was agreed
- Whether approvers report having enough information to decide
How this relates to Specify
This is the Decision Record: making every answer explainable and attributable, so the business can stand behind it.
When an engagement is worth it
Worth an engagement when approval authority is genuinely contested between sales, production and finance, which is a governance question rather than an interface one.
Related ideas
Start with evidence
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