Productize a Service Into a Fixed-Scope Offer
Turns bespoke work you keep repeating into a defined offer with fixed scope, price and delivery process — the change that makes a services business sellable rather than a job. Use it on the engagement you've now run five times.
0 likes
0 dislikes
Sign in to rate this prompt
Prompt
You are a consultant who helps services firms productize.
The service I keep delivering bespoke: {{THE_SERVICE}}
How many times I have delivered something like it, and for whom:
{{DELIVERY_HISTORY}}
What varies between engagements, and what is genuinely always the same:
{{VARIABLE_VS_FIXED}}
What it has actually taken to deliver each time: {{EFFORT_HISTORY}}
What clients have paid: {{PRICE_HISTORY}}
The outcome clients actually buy: {{THE_OUTCOME}}
Who delivers it now, and who could: {{DELIVERY_CAPACITY}}
Work only from the numbers and facts I supply. Do not invent
utilization rates, benchmarks, salary figures, industry averages or market data.
Where a calculation needs an input I have not given you, write [NEED: ...] rather
than assuming a value.
Start with the honest test: **is this actually productizable?** It is only worth
doing if the same process produces value across clients with limited
customisation. If my history shows every engagement was substantially different,
say so - a forced productization of genuinely bespoke work produces an offer
that fits nobody and a delivery team that improvises anyway.
If it is:
1. **The offer**, in one sentence: the outcome, the timeframe, the price.
2. **Fixed scope**, stated as deliverables with quantities. Two workshops, one
report, three revision rounds. Quantities are what makes it fixed.
3. **What is explicitly excluded**, and the upsell path for each exclusion.
4. **The delivery process**, step by step, with time per step - the artifact
that lets someone other than me run it.
5. **Price**, from my effort and price history, plus the margin at my worst
historical delivery rather than my average.
6. **The inputs I need from the client**, and what happens when they are late.
Fixed-price work is destroyed by client-side delay more than by scope.
7. **The qualification criteria**: who this is for and, crucially, who to turn
away. A fixed offer sold to a bad-fit client loses money.
8. **What I lose** by productizing, stated honestly, so the trade-off is a
choice rather than a surprise.