How to improve an SOP

A good SOP is never the first draft — it's the third. The fastest way to get there is not a better prompt. It's a loop: keep the steps that are already right, flag only the ones that aren't, say what's wrong with them in a few words, and regenerate just those. The document converges instead of drifting, because everything you approved stays exactly as you approved it.

The loop, in four moves

1. Keep first, not last.

   Read the draft once and decide what survives. Most drafts get the majority of steps roughly right; treating the whole thing as disposable throws that away.

2. Flag with a reason.

   "Too vague" and "missing the approval gate" produce different rewrites. The reason is the instruction.

3. Refine, don't regenerate.

   Regenerating rolls the dice on the whole document. Refining touches only what you marked.

4. Stop when a new hire could follow it.

   Not when it reads well — when someone who has never done the task could execute it unsupervised.

A worked example

Client onboarding at a five-person agency. Here is the first draft — the kind of thing any generator produces from a one-line description.

Steps 1 and 4 are fine. Steps 2, 3, and 5 are the problem: no owner, no deadline, no named systems, and no gate before work starts. Those three get flagged; the rest is kept.

Then make it repeatable

The leap isn't a better prompt — it's turning the drafts that worked into a house pattern. When an SOP is good enough that you'd hand it to a new hire, rate it five stars. Those rated SOPs become the worked examples the generator learns your industry's level of detail from, and the best ones (with permission) become public examples other operators can start from.