Your Secret Sauce Is a Text File
A firm can turn accumulated judgement into an owned asset by encoding how it works in private instructions that agents can use.
Developed from a conversation between Pete Winn, Andy David and Jarrad Grigg
Much of a firm’s commercial difference sits in the judgement its people have built over years. It shapes how they frame problems, choose between options and recognise a good result, but often remains implicit in individual working habits. Writing that judgement down makes it durable and usable beyond the person who first developed it.
The container can be surprisingly ordinary. Jarrad described a firm’s secret sauce as text documents that distil career knowledge into instructions for agents. Those files can capture the firm’s preferred methods, decision rules and ways of working, allowing agents to apply the same accumulated judgement repeatedly instead of depending on a particular software provider to remember it.
That changes what the firm needs to own. Models and agent systems can be swapped as their cost or quality changes, while the private instructions remain the stable layer that defines how the business operates. Publishing them would give others access to the same encoded know-how. Kept private and portable, the text files become capital goods that preserve the firm’s commercial difference.