The CVI + CVO Framework®

In most small businesses, technology decisions default to whoever is most technically confident. That can work. More often it doesn't and you end up on a hamster wheel of swapping platforms when the platforms were never really the issue.

The CVI + CVO Framework was developed to give non-technical people a way into technology decisions that feels natural. Traditional scoping sessions and technical briefs lose the room. The jargon is there to make the process look more sophisticated than it is. People disengage and the things that actually matter go undocumented.

Anyone can articulate a Commercially Valuable Outcome. You don't have to be technical. In a small business, CVOs are a way of capturing what might be called "undocumented muscle memory" the things everyone knows but no one has written down.

Once CVOs are established, the next step is collecting the Commercially Valuable Interactions ~ the CVIs ~ that the people in your business attribute to each outcome, in their own words.

This matters because you're not framing it as a technical specification. You're asking people what they think actually moves the needle. That's a very different conversation, and it surfaces what really matters.

These are the kinds of CVOs and CVIs that surface in transformation work. They're articulated in plain English — because that's how they need to be captured to be useful.

The framework has been used in product development, system specification, and feature design. It's currently active inside the Digitising Events operation. Where, for example, the CVO of a further reading block isn't simply "get someone to view another article" but to get them to actually read it. That distinction changes everything about how the feature gets built.

The principles matter more in an AI context, not less. Synthesising thousands of words to satisfy an outdated SEO requirement is not the CVO of content. Knowing what outcome you're actually trying to achieve, before deploying agents or automation, is what separates useful AI from noise.