Show capability beyond published products
Give customers whose requirement may be deliverable a route forward, even when no exact product exists.
- Evidence
- Hypothesis. Specify's argument, untested by us or anyone else we can cite. Treat it as a position somebody should try to falsify.
- Difficulty
- Significant. 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 catalogue lists what has already been defined, priced, photographed and published. It is a projection of capability, not capability itself. Customers who need something inside the business's real ability but outside its published set are told, in effect, that it does not exist.
Why it matters
The gap between what a business can make and what its website admits to is invisible to everyone except the customers who fall into it, and they leave without saying why. Closing part of that gap does not require publishing every possibility, only admitting that the published set is not the boundary.
Where it applies
- Made-to-order and configurable products
- Businesses whose sales team routinely agrees to things the site does not offer
- Any catalogue where a size, material or finish is available but only on request
Suggested implementation
- Model the axes of variation the business genuinely supports, with their real limits, before touching the storefront.
- Record the combinations that are not possible, which is usually the harder and more valuable half.
- Offer a described route rather than a promise: what can be asked for, what happens next, and who decides.
- Keep the published catalogue as the fast path. This is an addition to it, not a replacement.
Risks and constraints
- The serious one: implying a capability the business cannot honour, which converts a lost sale into a broken commitment.
- Unbounded custom demand can overwhelm a team that has no process for triaging it.
- A capability model that is not maintained becomes wrong quietly, and wrong capability data is worse than none.
What to measure
- How many requests arrive through the new route, and how many are answerable
- The proportion that reach a decision rather than being escalated indefinitely
- Whether the sales team spends less time re-answering the same feasibility questions
How this relates to Specify
This is what a Capability Map and a Constraint Record exist to express: what can be delivered, under which conditions, and with whose approval.
When an engagement is worth it
This is the largest idea in the catalogue and the one least likely to succeed as a side project. It needs capability modelling with the people who run production, not a content exercise.
Related ideas
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.