Blog · Tag
field-note.
28 posts in this archive.
April DDQ patterns, a year later
A field note on the questionnaires that landed this week — what's repeating from last April, what's new, and the two categories that are quietly eating the most response time.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 12
A short Friday field note — three exec summaries rewritten this week. A commercial SaaS bid, a federal task-order response, and a managed-services renewal. The standalone installment before Monday's long-form pillar.
DDQ season is now year-round
In 2025 the DDQ volume showed a clear seasonal peak — Q4 renewal cycles, January onboarding. A year later the seasonality has flattened. What changed and what it means for capacity planning.
The capture-lead role, reconsidered
The shape of the capture-lead role we started with, the shape it became, and why the difference matters for anyone hiring into the role in 2026.
The Q2 FY kickoff Monday-morning triage
Eight federal RFPs dropped into the queue over the first weekend of Q2 FY. The 25-minute drill that sorts them into respond-today, respond-this-week, and wait-for-the-amendment.
The Presidents' Day proposal stagger
Two RFPs due Wednesday, a federal team off Monday for the holiday. How we resequence the pipeline to land both bids without a Tuesday-night fire drill.
The Saturday compliance-matrix catch-up
A 45-minute Saturday routine for a shop that missed the Thursday compliance check-in. Five passes over the matrix, with a stop rule at the first unanswerable row.
The Valentine's Day deadline drill
A weird pattern in our submission data: federal fiscal-year Q2 RFP deadlines cluster around mid-February. Here's the drill we run when three bids land in the same week.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 10
The monthly exec-summary teardown, continuing. Three real openings rewritten this week. What was wrong, what I changed, and the rule each rewrite reinforced.
The Christmas Day silent-inbox note
Nothing is shipping today. No buyer is responding. No clarification question is getting answered. This is the correct default, and here is why we built the system around it.
A Christmas Eve draft review note
Two drafts crossed my desk this morning, Christmas Eve. What they said, what they missed, and why the review still happened despite the date.
The December DDQ panic day
A field note on the second Monday of December: what buyers send, why they send it then, and what the vendor side should do about it.
The Halloween submit weekend triage
Operational note for proposal teams facing weekend deadlines. Three rules we run on every weekend submit. Short, written down so we can find it again next Halloween.
The federal Q1 push: triaging three RFPs at once
The 90-minute drill we use when three federal solicitations drop in the same day. Three buckets, four questions per bid, one written decision. The thing you cannot afford to do on a Friday afternoon in October.
The Q4 DDQ surge is almost here
Procurement-side patterns for Q4 2025: what buyers are sending right now, what volume looks like at the question level, and what to expect in the next eight weeks.
Six months of the blog: what readers keep coming back to
Six months in, three posts keep getting shared, two flopped, and one surprised me. Notes from the founder on what the field-journal experiment is teaching us about what proposal practitioners actually want to read.
The Saturday backlog triage pattern
Thirty minutes on a Saturday morning, three buckets, and Monday is ready to go. A small operational ritual we use to keep the proposal backlog from compounding into chaos.
Our own proposal process, in public
How PursuitAgent responds to its own inbound RFPs. The intake, the bid/no-bid, the writing, the gold team, and the parts of the product that don't help us yet because we haven't built them.
The 20-minute proposal retro
The ritual we run after every submit. Five questions. One owner per action item. Twenty minutes. Why most proposal post-mortems don't happen and what makes this one stick.
Procurement-side pain is real — and underserved
Buyers also hate the category. Three quotes from public procurement blogs and what they tell us about how the industry has under-served the buyer side of the RFP relationship.
Naming the category: proposal intelligence
Why we coined 'proposal intelligence' instead of riding the existing labels — RFP software, response management, content automation. What the phrase has to earn, and what we're explicitly not claiming with it.
The scoring rubric on the first read of any RFP
Three minutes. Find the scoring paragraph. Note the page, the heading, and the weights. The habit that shapes the entire response — and why most teams skip it.
The Monday-morning RFP triage standup
15 minutes, four questions, one decision. The weekly ritual that replaces inbox scraping and stops bid/no-bid from happening by drift.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 5
Continuing the field-note series. Three before-and-after passages from real (anonymized) executive summaries, with the rewriting reasoning made explicit.
The second-question rule for SME asks
A short field-note on how to ask SMEs for input. Ask one concrete question first; save the open-ended one for after you've got the first answer.
The shadow SMEs who should be on every proposal invite
Three roles answer the hardest questions on most proposals and aren't titled as experts. How to identify them in your org and why they belong on the kickoff invite.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week
Three before/after exec summary openings — illustrative, not customer-attributed. The pattern is the same: replace the abstract with the specific, replace the categorical with the buyer.
The proposal backlog after a long weekend
Memorial Day Tuesday: 11 RFPs in the inbox, three SMEs back from PTO, and 90 minutes before standup. Three triage moves we use.
See the proposal workflow
Take the 5-minute tour, then start a trial workspace when you're ready to run a real pursuit against your own source material.