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Business model · Choose, Plan

Make / buy / partner

Decides how to obtain a capability you need and do not have. The default answer is build, the right answer usually is not, and the deciding question is whether the capability differentiates you.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
03 Choose, 04 Plan
Works at
All levels
Maturity
Scaling → Large organisation
Time
Half a day per capability

What it is

A structured choice between building a capability, acquiring it, or accessing it through a partner. The determining question is not cost but strategic significance: whether this capability is a reason customers choose you.

Strategic significance
Whether the capability differentiates you. If customers choose you because of it, ownership matters and building is usually right regardless of cost.
Make
Building internally. Full control and full ongoing cost — the maintenance burden, not the build cost, is what gets underestimated.
Buy
Acquiring a product, a licence or a company. Fastest to adequate, and constrained thereafter by what the vendor decides to do.
Partner
Accessing it through another organisation. Trades control for speed and reach, and creates a dependency that should be named.
Total cost over time
Including maintenance, upgrade, staffing and switching. Build cases routinely stop at go-live.
Revisit trigger
What would change the answer. Capability decisions age badly and are rarely revisited on purpose.
The mistake people makeOrganisations default to building because it feels like control and the ongoing cost is invisible at decision time. Reserve building for what differentiates you; for everything else, adequate and available beats ideal and eighteen months away.
What it’s forYou need a capability you do not have and must choose how to get it.
What it’s not forThe capability is your core differentiator. Then the answer is make, and the analysis is theatre.

How you run it

  1. Ask first whether it differentiatesIf customers choose you because of this capability, build it. If not, the question is only about cost and speed.
  2. Establish the real cost of buildingNot the project cost — the ongoing cost of maintaining, staffing and keeping current something outside your core. This is where build cases are consistently wrong.
  3. Check what the market already sellsBuying something adequate today usually beats building something ideal in eighteen months, particularly if it is not differentiating.
  4. Consider partnering as its own answerNot a compromise between the other two. Partnering trades control for speed and access, and it is right when the capability matters but ownership does not.
  5. Set a revisit triggerDecisions age. State what would change the answer — a scale threshold, a supplier failure, a shift in what differentiates you.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • A specific named capability, not a general area
  • An honest view of whether it differentiates you
  • Some sense of what the market offers

You’ll end up with

  • A decision per capability with a stated rationale
  • Cost and time for the chosen route
  • What you would need to be true to revisit it

Runs well with

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