Every federal services firm over three years old is sitting on $500,000 to $5 million of productizable IP.

They just can't see it.

The reason is simple: they built it while delivering something else. A custom dashboard for a Navy PM became a tool three engineers still use on every task order. A compliance spreadsheet evolved into a standardized intake template used across four agencies. A proprietary scoring model someone built over a weekend became the unofficial methodology the firm uses on every proposal.

None of that shows up in the financials. None of it has a product name, a pricing page, or a SKU. It lives in shared drives, engineer laptops, and tribal knowledge. And it's exactly the stuff HARBOR's Harvest stage — contract archaeology — is designed to surface.

Here's the checklist we use when we run a HARBOR Sprint on a firm's delivery history. Six sections, forty questions. Go through it honestly and you'll walk away with a list of 8-15 candidates that, once scored, tell you what to productize first.

Section 1: Existing contract review

Start with your last eight quarters of task orders. Export them by CLIN type. Look for:

CLINs with >50% gross margin. These are the "hidden products" — deliverables you're charging for that cost you less than you think. High-margin CLINs almost always point at productizable IP.
Recurring deliverables across three or more contracts. If you've written the same type of report, built the same type of dashboard, or delivered the same kind of training for multiple customers, that's a product waiting for a package.
Accelerators or tools that made delivery faster or cheaper. Did your team build something internal that cut delivery time from 120 to 40 hours? That internal accelerator IS the product.
Standardized methodologies referenced in proposals. Does your proposal library have a named process your firm follows on every engagement? That's a productizable asset.
Customer feedback themes. What do your customers consistently ask you about, recommend you to peers for, or single out in CPARS ratings? Those themes point at your durable capability.

What you're building: a raw inventory of everything your firm has delivered more than once. Don't filter yet. Don't score yet. Just list.

Expect 20-50 items on this list from an 8-year-old firm. It's OK if some are obviously weak candidates — you'll filter later.

Section 2: IP audit — the digital archaeology

Contract review surfaces what's in the financial record. But most productizable IP never gets billed as a CLIN — it lives in the background tools, scripts, and templates your team builds while delivering the billable work.

The IP audit is where you find that hidden layer. Checklist:

Search shared drives for templates, tools, automation, frameworks, methodologies. Look at your internal SharePoint, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence. What have people built?
Check project folders from high-margin contracts. The engagements where your team was most efficient — what enabled that?
Review proposal libraries for reusable technical approaches. Is there a solution architecture diagram that shows up in every proposal with minor edits?
Examine training materials developed for customers. If you trained customers, you have curriculum. Curriculum is productizable.
Catalog code repositories. GitHub, GitLab, internal BitBucket, even private AWS CodeCommit. What exists?
List all SBIR/STTR awards in company history. Including ones that didn't go to Phase II. Each is a potential IP source.
Identify Phase II completions not yet commercialized. The most common hidden asset — a prototype built for the agency and then shelved.
Check for unexpired data rights and patents. Any filings? Any "limited rights" markings on deliverables that could transfer to commercial use?

What you're building: a digital inventory of every artifact your firm has produced. Cross-reference against Section 1. You'll find that some high-margin CLINs had hidden tooling behind them — those are the richest candidates.

Section 3: Vehicle analysis — where can you sell it?

You can't productize what you can't sell. Even the best product idea is dead on arrival if your firm doesn't have a vehicle that supports product CLINs.

List all active contract vehicles and SINs. GSA MAS SINs (which ones?), GWACs (which category?), IDIQs (which caps?).
Identify SINs supporting software/SaaS sales. GSA MAS Cloud Marketplace? SIN 54151S? Highlight any SIN that lets you sell licenses, not just labor.
Note vehicles with FFP product CLINs already in place. If you already have vehicles with fixed-price product CLINs (not labor hour rates), you're structurally ahead.
Flag vehicles requiring modification for product sales. Most services-only SINs need modifications to support product sales. That's a 3-6 month timeline minimum.
Estimate modification timeline for each. Be honest. If your GSA MAS addition is going to take 12 months, your product launch is constrained by that.

What you're building: a vehicle matrix that tells you — for any given candidate — what the selling path is. Candidates with easy vehicle paths are higher priority than candidates whose sales path is 18 months away.

This is also where a lot of services firms discover their biggest blind spot: they have all the delivery capability in the world but no vehicle to sell a product through. If that's you, the vehicle work needs to start now, in parallel with whatever else you do.

Section 4: Delivery lead interviews — the 10-question script

Here's where the best candidates usually surface. Your delivery leads know things your financials don't. They've rebuilt the same tool three times; they know which part of the last engagement was actually valuable; they know what customers keep asking for but you don't offer.

Interview every senior delivery lead. Budget 45 minutes per person. Ten questions:

What do you find yourself rebuilding on every project? (The rebuilt thing is the candidate.)
Is there a tool/template you've created that you wish you could bring to every engagement? (Your internal "tools of the trade.")
What do customers consistently ask for that we don't have packaged? (Demand signal.)
What made your highest-margin project so efficient? (The efficiency lever is the productizable asset.)
Have you ever built something for one customer that another customer later wanted? (Proven cross-customer demand.)
Where do you see other contractors struggling that we handle well? (Differentiation.)
If you could productize one thing from your work, what would it be? (Their intuition — often right.)
Are there any "secret weapons" your team uses that leadership doesn't know about? (Tribal knowledge becomes product.)
What training materials have you developed that could apply beyond your current contract? (Curriculum as product.)
Who else should I talk to about potential product opportunities? (Snowball to more interviewees.)

Record or take detailed notes. Tag every answer as a candidate or a signal. You'll add 10-20 more items to your inventory from these interviews alone.

The single highest-ROI question in this list is #4. Efficiency levers are productizable more reliably than anything else your delivery leads will mention.

Section 5: Candidate documentation

For each candidate that surfaced in Sections 1-4, write a one-page profile:

Source signal. What evidence points at this being productizable? (Multiple deployments? Multiple customers? High margin? Delivery lead recommendation?)
Description. 2-3 sentences. What does the thing actually do?
Deployment history. How many times has this been deployed? To which customers? Under which contracts?
Documentation state. Well-documented? Partially? Undocumented? Code only?
Current owner/champion. Who in your firm knows this inside-out?
Initial assessment. Repeatability (H/M/L), Market potential (H/M/L), Technical readiness (H/M/L).

The output of this section is typically 8-15 candidate profiles. That's your productization shortlist. Too many candidates? Cut the ones with weak source signals (1-2 mentions). Too few? Do more delivery lead interviews.

Section 6: Findings summary

Finally, consolidate everything into a 2-3 page findings summary that:

Summarizes the audit period + data sources. (Last 8 quarters of task orders, 12 delivery lead interviews, 47 shared drive folders, etc.)
Counts candidates by category. Total, high-potential, medium-potential, low-potential.
Names the top 3 candidates for formal Service-to-Product Fit scoring (which happens in the next HARBOR phase, Architect).
Documents key insights and recommended next steps.

This findings memo is the artifact a HARBOR Sprint produces. If you're running this yourself, budget 40-60 hours across 2-3 weeks to do it properly. If you want someone to do it for you (with federal data grounding + methodology rigor), that's what the $15K HARBOR Sprint is designed for.

What the best Harvests find

Across the firms we've worked with, the best contract archaeology outputs share three patterns:

The winning candidate is usually NOT the one the CEO expected. Leadership's favorite gets scored poorly because it's weak on Vehicle Access or Economic Viability. The surprise winner is usually something a delivery lead championed that nobody at the exec level had prioritized.
Cross-customer reuse is the strongest signal. A tool that's been deployed for 3+ different customers already has market validation baked in. A tool that's been deployed for 1 customer 3 times is just a custom project.
Internal efficiency accelerators outperform customer-facing deliverables. The thing that saved your team 80% of their time on every engagement is usually more productizable than the customer-facing deliverable itself.

Running the Harvest with HARBOR Agent

The full six-section archaeology process takes a skilled operator 40-60 hours. HARBOR Agent — the AI backend we've built for the platform — runs the same process in 45-90 minutes, grounding every candidate in live federal data (from USASpending + SAM) and methodology citations from the books.

If you want to see what Harvest outputs look like before committing to run one, try the HARBOR Agent demo — three cached sample firms showing the full Harvest output including candidate inventory, S2P scoring, and findings memo.

If you want your firm's actual Harvest run, start with the free HARBOR Signal diagnostic to confirm your firm is at a readiness level where Harvest will produce meaningful results. Firms under $1M revenue or with less than 3 years of delivery history often don't have enough signal for contract archaeology to surface strong candidates yet — we'll tell you that honestly.

The methodology is in Book 2, Appendix B. The platform does the work. The output is a product inventory that most firms didn't know they had.

About HARBOR: HARBOR is a book-codified methodology + platform for federal services firms transforming into product companies. Start at harbor.build/signal.

The contract archaeology checklist: finding productizable IP in your delivery history