STANDARD PROMPTS OR CUSTOM BINARY BUSINESS EP BB-09

Standard Prompts or Custom Workflows? Binary Business - BB-09

A VP showed me their company's AI prompt library. Forty-seven prompts. Versioned. Color-coded. You know how many people actually used them? Three. And one was the VP who made them. Everyone else built their own in secret—like speakeasies, but for productivity.

In this episode, I break down whether to standardize AI prompts across your organization or let people build custom workflows using the ABCD framework.

**What You'll Learn:**
• Why prompt libraries become digital tumbleweed on SharePoint
• The difference between template tyranny and abandonment with extra steps
• The three-bucket framework for deciding what to standardize
• Why "it'll be a team effort" means you're building a museum, not a system
• The custom-to-standard loop that actually compounds over time
• How to run this decision through the Binary Scorecard

🎯 **Download the free Binary Decision Scorecard:** https://entrenovaai.com/scorecard

**Timestamps:**
0:00 - The 47-Prompt Prompt Library Nobody Uses
0:30 - Show Intro
1:30 - Context: The Gap Between Leadership and Reality
4:30 - The Binary: Standard vs. Custom
7:45 - ABCD Breakdown
14:00 - The Scorecard Test

Binary Business is a business decision podcast for operators navigating AI.

Each 10-15 minute episode breaks one AI decision into a clear binary choice using the ABCD framework: Audience, Build, Convert, Deliver.

100 Episodes. 4 Seasons. One System.

Season 1 (Jan-Mar): Who AI decisions are for
Season 2 (Apr-Jun): How systems break when AI scales
Season 3 (Jul-Sep): Where AI moves money
Season 4 (Oct-Dec): How to execute AI decisions

New episodes drop every Tuesday & Thursday.

This isn't a podcast about AI hype. It's a framework for making high-stakes decisions in a world where AI is changing the rules.

Subscribe to follow the full arc. By Episode 100, you'll have a portable decision system that works for any business challenge.

🎯 Free Resource: Binary Decision Scorecard
https://go.binarybusiness.tech/gzkqjw9n-yt-pod-bb-01

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https://app.usemotion.com/meet/willguidry/EntreNova-Will?d=30

🔗 LinkedIn:
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Binary Business. All signal. No noise.

Transcript

0:00

Last month, the VP showed me their company's AI prompt library, 47 prompts, carefully written, versioned, color coded. You know how many people actually use them? Three. And one of them was the VP who made them. Everyone else built their own in secret, like speakeasies. But for productivity Today, standardized prompts or custom workflows. Let's get into it. Welcome to Binary Business. I'm Will Guidry. This show is about one thing, cutting through the noise to help you make better business decisions in the age of ai. No frameworks that require a consulting engagement or. 12 step processes. Just binary choices run through a real operator's lens so that you can move faster with more confidence. Today's binary, should you standardize AI prompts across your organization or let people build custom workflows for their specific needs. Consistency or flexibility control or creativity, and maybe just maybe a middle path that doesn't suck the life out of you. Let's sort this out. Here's where most companies are right now with AI prompts. someone usually it, sometimes marketing and occasionally one person in operation who gets AI creates a prompt library, best practices, approved language, maybe a SharePoint site. Definitely a teams channel that nobody checks, and then nothing happens. Well, not necessarily nothing. Something does happen. People ignore it. I talked to a finance team last quarter. Their company had 17 approved prompts for financial analysis. 17, tested, validated, signed off by legal, you know, what the actual analysts were using. Chat, GPT conversations. They've been refining for six months on their personal accounts at home, on their phones, like they were running underground gambling operations. One analyst told me, and I quote, I didn't even know we had approved prompts. She'd been with the company for three years, so we have a gap. Leadership wants consistency, governance, predictable outputs. Employees want tools that actually work for their specific problems. And somewhere in between, we've got prompt libraries sitting in SharePoint, like digital Tumbleweed. The question isn't whether prompts matter, they certainly do. The question is, who builds them? Who owns them, and how do you balance good enough for everyone? Against perfect for someone? That's the real binary here. Binary one, standard prompts. Everyone uses the same inputs, gets predictable outputs, and you can actually govern what's happening or binary. Zero Custom workflows, people build what works for them, iterate fast, and you hope the good ideas spread organically. Both have merit, both have landmines. Let's walk through them. Binary one standard prompts. The pitch sounds great. You create a library of battle tested prompts. Everyone uses the same inputs. Outputs are consistent. Legal can sleep at night. It can actually support it, and in theory, you're building organizational capability, not just individual skill. I've seen this work. A manufacturing company I worked with had 12 standard prompts for quality control documentation, same inputs, same format, same outputs. New hires could generate compliant reports in day one. That's real leverage, but here's the problem most prompts aren't quality control documentation. Most prompts are messy, contextual, and they require iteration. When you standardize prematurely, you freeze mediocrity in place. I call this template tyranny. It's when the prompt library becomes a security blanket for leadership instead of a productivity tool for teams. We have AI governance becomes more important than AI actually helps people. and the dirty secret. When standard prompts don't work, people don't submit improvement requests. They just work around them. Congratulations, you now have shadow AI on top of your official AI binary zero custom workflows. the pitch here is autonomy and speed. Let people build what they need. Best ideas bubble up. Innovation happens at the edges. This also works. A sales team I consulted with Let every rep build their own outreach workflows. No governance, no templates, full chaos mode. Within three months, one rep had built something so good that close rates jumped by 40%. Leadership noticed that they asked to standardize it. See the irony, the innovation came from letting go, but the scale came from standardizing the winner. Here's the problem with customization. Not everyone is that rep. Not everyone has the skill, the time, or the interest in building sophisticated workflows. Some people just want to do their job, and when you tell them, figure out AI yourself, they hear AI is your problem. Now, that's not empowerment. That's abandonment with extra steps. So we've got template tyranny on one side, and abandonment with extra steps on the other. Neither is great. Let's run this through the A, B, C, D and find the actual answer before we break this down. If you want to test decisions like this against real operator criteria, grab the binary decision scorecard. The link is in the description. Time to run this through the A, B, CD framework. Audience, build, convert, deliver. A is for audience who's actually affected by this decision. Here's where most leaders get it wrong immediately. They think about the organization, they talk about AI governance and enterprise capability, but prompts don't exist at the organizational level. They exist at the task level. Who writes customer emails? Who generates reports? Who summarizes meeting notes, who drafts proposals? Those are your audiences, and they're not homogenous. Your customer success team has very different needs than your finance team. Your sales reps face different problems than your legal department. When you ask standard or custom, the first question is standard for whom or custom for what? Here's a framework that actually works. Divide your AI use cases into three buckets. Bucket one, high volume, low variation tasks, same input, same output every time. Email templates, status updates, compliance, documentation. These should be standardized. No debate. Bucket two. High judgment. High variation tasks, strategy documents, creative work, complex analysis. These should be custom period. Anyone trying to standardize creative strategy is solving the wrong problem. Bucket three. Everything in between. This is where it gets interesting. The bucket needs guardrails, not templates, boundaries, not prescriptions. Think of it like this. You don't give someone a script for a sales call. You give them talk tracks. Objection handlers, and the freedom to be human. Same principle applies here. B is for build. What are you actually building when you standardize? a prompt. Library isn't a product, it's a system, and systems require maintenance, iteration, and ownership. I've seen exactly three prompt libraries that actually work at scale. You know what they all had in common? A human being whose job included updating them. Not someone who owns the SharePoint site, not the person who created it originally. A person with actual allocated time to review, improve and sunset prompts that aren't working without that. Your library is a museum. Historical artifacts from that one offsite where everyone was excited about ai. Here's the uncomfortable question. Is anyone actually going to maintain this? If the answer is it'll be a team effort or we'll figure it out, you're building a museum. If the answer is yes, Jennifer has four hours a week allocated, you might be building a system. C is for convert. How do you get people to actually use this? This is where standard prompts usually die. Leadership creates communication sins, and then. Crickets. Here's why. Adoption isn't an announcement. It's a behavior change, and behavior change requires three things. First, the new thing has to be easier than the old thing. Not better in theory, easier in practice. If someone has to leave their workflow, log into SharePoint, search for a prompt, copy it, paste it, and modify it, they won't. They'll just use what they already have. Second, there has to be visible success. Someone they know doing work they recognize gets better results. Leadership says it's great, isn't compelling. Sarah in accounting, cut her month in close by two days is. Third, the cost of non adoption has to be real, not. We want everyone to use this real consequences. If someone can ignore your prompt library with zero impact on their performance review, they certainly will. Most prompt libraries have none of these. They're easier to ignore than to use. Success. Stories live in leadership decks, not teams, channels, and non adoption is completely invisible. D is for deliver. What's the actual operating rhythm? Here's where I land on this decision. Standard prompts work for stable repetitive task, where consistency matters more than optimization. Custom workflows work for complex evolving work where the person closest to the problem knows best, but the real answer is a system not a choice. Here's the model I've seen work. Start with custom. Let people build what they need. Track what works and look for patterns. When a custom workflow outperforms everything else, you can prove it and standardize that specific solution. Then watch for when the standard stops working because it will tasks change. AI changes. What was optimal six months ago might be mediocre today. when the standard underperforms custom solutions by a meaningful margin sunset it let people build again, this is a loop, not a decision. Customize, standardize the winners, monitor sunset under performers, and then customize again. The companies that treat standard or custom as a one-time choice end up stuck. The companies that treat it as an ongoing rhythm keep improving. Alright, let's run this through the binary decision scorecard. Test one does this create leverage? Standard prompts can create leverage, but only for stable tasks with clear ownership If you're standardizing prematurely or without maintenance resources, you're creating overhead, not leverage. Custom workflows create leverage at the individual level, but don't scale without a mechanism to capture and spread wins. The hybrid model, custom to standard loop creates compounding leverage. You get innovation at the edges and scale at the center. Score conditional on model choice test number two. Does this relieve the primary constraint? What's actually slowing your team down if it's inconsistency, different people, different outputs. Unpredictable quality standardization relieves that. If it's capability, people don't know how to use AI effectively. Standardization might make it worse. You're giving people templates for problems they don't understand. If the constraint is, people don't know how to prompt training beats templates every time. So the score depends on your actual constraint. Test three will benefits compound over time. A static prompt library. Depreciates a living system. Compounds. If you're building a system with feedback loops, ownership and iteration. Yeah. If you're building a library with a launch date and no maintenance plan, that's a hard no. The score system, yes. Library. No. Test four. Does this build a moat or rent someone else's organizational knowledge? Captured in effective workflows is definitely a moat, but only if it's maintained and evolves. Templates copied from the internet or generated by an LLM aren't a moat. They're table stakes. Score depends on the source and iteration. Test five. Does this reduce dependency? Standard prompts can reduce dependency on individual experts if they're good enough. Bad standards create different dependencies on the template, creator on IT support or on workarounds. So the score depends on execution. Test six will you get clear signals in 30 to 60 days. Yes, if you're measuring the right things, not measuring how many people access the library measure how many people use the prompts. Did output quality improve? Did efficiency improve? If you can't answer those questions in 60 days, you're not measuring. So the score, yes, with proper metrics. Final test, test seven. Is this aligned with where the business is going? AI is getting better at understanding context and generating custom outputs. The value of static prompts is declining. The value of knowing when and how to use AI is increasing build for judgment, not templates. So the score custom first with selective standardization always wins. Here's where I land on the matter. Don't start with standardization. Start with enabling. Let people build custom workflows. Watch what works, and then standardize the winners. Maintain those standards, release them when they stop working. This isn't standard or custom. It's a rhythm of custom to standard to custom. Again, the companies that nailed this don't have the best prompt libraries. They have the best systems for capturing and spreading what actually works. If you wanna apply this kind of thinking to your own AI decisions, grab the binary decision scorecard. The links in the description. It's the same filter I use with clients to find real leverage. In the next episode, democratize AI access or G it. Who gets access, why and what happens when you get it wrong? Until then, i'm Will Guidry. This is binary business. All signal, no noise.