The First Monday

Field guides end with field work. Four moves, starting Monday morning.

Pick the product family that hurts. Not the flagship, not the easy one: the family with the slowest quotes, the most engineering escalations, the most apologies. That's where structure pays first, and where the proof will be loudest.

Run the last-50-orders scorecard. For each order: how many engineering touches, how many change orders after approval, how far the margin drifted from plan. One spreadsheet, one afternoon, and you'll know whether you have an ETO business or an ETO habit.

Ask one question of your leadership team: where does our product actually think? If the honest answer is "in Johan's head, a price file, and four thousand PDFs," you've found your project, and this book has given you its shape: structure the products, govern the prices, bottle the experts, then, and only then, let the AI talk.

Kill one workaround per week. Every workaround is a place where your system lost an argument with reality. Each one you retire is a rule clarified, a price defended, or an explanation added. Fifty weeks, fifty repairs: that's a transformation disguised as housekeeping.

The ideas in this guide are the argument. The full book behind it, with the war stories, the failures, and the playbooks in full depth, is on its way. If you want it when it lands, and a monthly field note before then, you'll find the newsletter at cpq.se.

One disclosure, because trust is the theme of this book: I implement CPQ systems for a living, and sailsrep.ai, mentioned among the tools shaping this space, is a product I helped build. Every opinion here was formed in the field, and paid for by someone's mistakes. A useful share of them were mine.

Magnus Fasth Uppsala, Sweden