Chapter 1 of 11 · ~2 min

The process, written down

Kettle Co. sells four ranges of kettle to businesses. Enquiries arrive by email and through a web form. A sales rep looks the company up, decides whether it is worth a quote, prices it from a spreadsheet, applies a discount by feel, sends a PDF, and means to follow up. Two reps do this differently. Nobody has written down the rule for discounts, and follow-ups are forgotten in busy weeks.

Before a coding agent writes anything, this has to become a page of plain prose. Not a specification and not a flowchart: a description of what happens, in order, with six things marked.

Steps. What happens, one line each, in the order it happens.
Owners. Who does each step: the prospect, a rep, a system, nobody yet.
Rules that already exist. Minimum order, countries served, the volume discount table. Write them down even if they live in someone's head.
Reasoning steps. Where a person currently has to read, weigh and decide something no rule captures: is this company worth the effort, how should the note be worded.
Waits. Where the process pauses for a person or for time.
Systems. What is looked up or written: the CRM, the price list, email.

The page is the brief. A coding agent given this page and the platform's reference will produce a first workflow that is close to right, because every decision it needs is on the page. A coding agent given "automate our sales enquiries" will produce something impressive and wrong.

Experiment

Runs in your browser

The brief for Kettle Co.'s enquiry process, as it was handed to the coding agent, with the six kinds of thing marked. Read it once as a rep would, once as the agent would.

The brief. One page, written by the sales lead in an hour. It is the only input the coding agent had besides the platform's reference.

Kettle Co. — inbound enquiry to quote
1. A prospect enquires, by email or the web form.            [step, prospect]
2. A rep looks the company up on the web and in the CRM.     [step, rep, system: CRM]
3. Is it worth quoting?                                       [judgement, rep]
   Rules that already exist:
   - minimum order 10 units                                  [rule]
   - we sell in UK, IE, FR, DE, NL, ES, IT only              [rule]
   - existing customers get 2 points more discount          [rule]
4. Price it: unit price by range; volume discount 5% at 50, [rule]
   10% at 200, 15% at 500 units. Anything above 15% needs
   the rep's say-so.                                          [judgement above 15%, rep]
5. Write a short cover note and send the quote as a PDF.    [judgement: wording only, rep]
6. Record the deal in the CRM.                               [system: CRM]
7. Wait about a week for a reply; chase twice at most.      [wait, prospect]
8. On Monday mornings, look at quotes older than two weeks. [wait: schedule, rep]
Who: prospect (website), sales rep (inbox), sales lead (escalation).
Systems: CRM (lookup, create deal, list deals). Email for the PDF.

1Every line names an owner. Where the owner is 'rep' and the line is not a rule, that is a judgement step until proven otherwise.
2Three rules that lived in people's heads. Writing them down is most of the work; the agent turns each into a few lines of code.
3The threshold that decides where a person must step in. It is a number, so it can be a gate.
4The one place a model earns its keep on the writing side: the numbers are fixed, the words are not.
5Waits and their limits are part of the process. A workflow that forgets them is the spreadsheet again.

Big question

Pick a process you own. Could you write its page tonight, or would you have to ask three people first?