How do you turn a bespoke solution built for one customer into a reusable product capability?

30-second answerSay your answer out loud first, then reveal.

Identify which parts are generic and which are customer-specific, then refactor: extract the general pattern (connectors, workflows, eval templates, guardrails) into configurable components, move customer specifics into configuration or plugins, document it, and validate it with a second and third customer before declaring it a product. Partner with the product and engineering teams so it fits the platform's architecture, support model and roadmap.

Process

1. Pattern recognition: "Three customers needed invoice extraction with ERP write-back, each with different fields and ERPs."

2. Separate concerns:

Generic (product)	Specific (configuration)
Document ingestion + parsing	Document templates, languages
Extraction engine with schema	Field definitions per customer
Validation framework	Business rules
ERP connector interface	SAP / Oracle / Tally adapters
Review UI + eval harness	Rubrics, thresholds

3. Refactor with tests: keep the original customer working (regression evals) while generalising.

4. Second-customer validation: deploy with configuration only; measure the effort to onboard.

5. Productisation: documentation, support runbooks, telemetry, pricing input. Hand ownership to the product team.

Common mistakes

Generalising too early, from one customer.
Over-configurability (a configuration DSL nobody understands).
Forked versions per customer that can't be upgraded.

PreviousDuring user acceptance testing, you discover the agent can be manipulated into deleting customer records. What do you do?

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How do you turn a bespoke solution built for one customer into a reusable product capability?

Process

Common mistakes

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