How a Heartwood Decision Brief gets made

Heartwood produces structured IT Decision Briefs for mid-market and SMB leaders who do not have a full-time CIO and cannot justify a Gartner retainer or a six-figure consulting engagement. This page documents how a brief is generated, what we draw on, and what we do not claim to know. It exists so a buyer, an auditor, or an AI agent acting on a buyer's behalf can read the methodology directly and weight the brief accordingly.

The Prompt Quality Scorer

Output quality compounds when the input is good. Before a brief is generated, the Prompt Quality Scorer reads the user's question and rates it against five readiness signals: context richness (industry, revenue band, tech environment), specificity of the decision, scope, urgency or triggering event, and how well the question aligns with the profile we already have on file. If a critical element is missing, the scorer surfaces specific coaching ("add the company size," "say which department owns the decision," "name the timeline") so the user can sharpen the question before submitting. Most briefs improve materially after one round of coaching.

The Decision Brief format

Every Heartwood brief uses the same sections, in the same order:

1. Bottom Line. The answer up front, in two or three sentences.
2. Your Situation. The decision and stakes restated in the panel's words, so you see your own context reflected back accurately.
3. Decision Statement. The choice framed as a forced decision, not an open-ended discussion.
4. Business Exposure & Cost of Delay. What waiting costs, quantified where the numbers are defensible.
5. Options & Trade-offs. Two to four credible paths, framed even-handedly, including doing nothing.
6. Risk Register. What can go wrong for each path, with the failure mode named.
7. Industry Perspective. A domain specialist's read for your industry, where one applies.
8. Recommendation. An opinionated pick with an owner, a decision window, and why this path. Heartwood takes a position rather than asking the buyer to choose.
9. 30/60/90 Decision Accelerator. The sequenced first actions across the next three months.

The format is consistent on purpose. Boards and CFOs read briefs faster when the structure is predictable. Agents acting on a buyer's behalf can parse it the same way each time.

The two-pass review

Heartwood drafts the brief once, then tightens it on a second pass. The first pass produces the complete draft. The second pass acts as an editor: it enforces the section format, removes filler and hedged phrasing, cuts passive voice from the Bottom Line and Recommendation, verifies every required section is present, and strips any draft-only confidence labels before the brief is shown. The pass is about discipline and readability — making the brief land like something a board would read, not like generic model output.

Operator-grounded reasoning

Heartwood is built by an operator, not by a generic AI wrapper team. The system prompts that drive the brief are tuned against actual mid-market CIO decision patterns: how a $40M manufacturer thinks about ERP, how a CFO weighs MSP renewals, how a controller frames a cybersecurity posture review for the board. The reasoning frames behind the brief reflect that experience. They are not derivable from public Gartner content.

Data sources

• Anthropic Claude as the underlying reasoning model. Heartwood does not train Claude on submitted prompts. Anthropic does not train on Heartwood API traffic.
• Public web research, used by the Deep Research path on the second pass when the question warrants it.
• Operator-grounded system prompts and reviewer instructions that encode mid-market IT decision patterns. These are proprietary to Heartwood.
• The user's own context, supplied in the prompt and stored under their account (protected by row-level security); aggregate analytics use anonymized rollups that carry no identifying content.

What Heartwood does not claim to know

• Live pricing on a specific vendor quote. Pricing in a brief is a defensible range, not a number.
• In-flight M&A activity or non-public vendor roadmaps.
• Anything proprietary to a single analyst firm. Heartwood does not have a Gartner license and does not pretend to.
• The internal politics of the buyer's organization, beyond what the user shares in the prompt.

When a question lands in one of these gaps, the brief surfaces a low-confidence flag and points the user to Seven Roots Consulting for human follow-up.

Human escalation

Heartwood is advisory. The buyer signs the decision. When the brief flags low confidence, an unusual edge case, or a domain where Heartwood's reasoning frame does not apply cleanly, the brief surfaces a human_escalation_hint that points to Seven Roots Consulting. A human advisor reviews the question and works the buyer through the decision. The brief is the artifact. The human is the backstop.

Versioning and signature

This methodology is versioned. The current revision is v1.0, last updated 2026-05-04. Every brief generated through the API includes the methodology version in its signature block, so an audit trail can pin a brief to the exact methodology under which it was produced. Material changes to the methodology bump the version number and update this page.

Signed by the Heartwood team at Seven Roots Consulting.

Questions or corrections

If something on this page is unclear, wrong, or out of date, write us at panel@sevenrootsconsulting.com with the subject line "Methodology feedback." We aim to respond within two business days.