Market Intelligence
Observe and synthesize external market conditions. Return reusable evidence, interpretations, and research implications. Strategy owners propose strategy; SSOT and explicit human approval establish approved canon.
Before starting
- Resolve the active project/product scope. Keep other projects' evidence and approval references out of this return; IDs are project-scoped.
- Read
../_shared/evidence-gaps.mdand../_shared/ssot-consumption.md. - Read
../_shared/opportunity-discovery.mdfor broad opportunity or repositioning questions. Generate business-use-case candidates before discussing product opportunities; classify workloads, requirements, problems, and triggers separately. - Read
../_shared/context-establishment.mdwhen available. It owns Phase 1 evidence, readiness, and handoff/return semantics. If unavailable, use the compatible minimum in references/research-return.md. Read that reference for domain evidence checks and the return template on every run. - Load relevant manifest-mapped approved context. Record source/version, authority, health, and gaps. Bootstrap context stays provisional, never canon.
- Accept research handoffs or standalone requests. Preserve originating HND/GAP, SRC/FND IDs, exact question, completion criteria, constraints, and return destination.
- Establish question/intended use, market/problem boundary, geography, and time horizon. Ask only for missing facts that materially change the work. Exploration needs useful scope, not an accepted market or approved persona.
- Inventory supplied evidence and prior research first. Disclose inaccessible, unreadable, excluded, and uninspected material instead of claiming full coverage.
Choose the smallest useful mode
Read the relevant section of references/modes.md. Do not run all modes merely to fill a report.
| Mode | Exact job and triggers | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Market overview | Explain market structure, demand conditions, drivers, constraints, and changes. “What changed in this market?” “Reconcile these reports.” | Scoped synthesis with dated findings and reconciled definitions. |
| Category analysis | Describe how solution categories are defined, understood, discovered, evaluated, and changing. “What does this category mean to buyers?” | Category-definition and terminology map with evaluation evidence. |
| Emerging opportunity investigation | Investigate changes that could create newly addressable needs. “What deserves investigation?” “What would falsify this opportunity?” | Testable hypotheses, counterevidence, and validation tasks. |
Modes can iterate. Category uncertainty may narrow a market overview. Opportunity investigation can request category clarification or competitive verification. Keep shared finding IDs rather than duplicating studies.
Research and synthesis
- Retrieve existing information, analyze unprocessed evidence, and clarify definitions before requesting internal facts or collecting new research.
- Choose sources/methods for the question. Separate observation, source report, interpretation, assumption, and approved decision.
- Record provenance, scope, method, meaningful denominators, source lineage, supporting/opposing evidence, limitations, and explicit unknowns.
- Explain apparent disagreements only when evidence demonstrates scope, time, version, or definition differences. Otherwise retain the contradiction and test.
- State what evidence supports and cannot establish. Separate confidence in an observation from confidence in its commercial implications.
- Assess completion criteria and evidence readiness for the affected action. Return the smallest useful investigation, never automatic strategy.
Ownership and consumers
| Need | Owner and boundary |
|---|---|
| Company-specific TAM/SAM/SOM, candidate scoring, where/whether to enter | market-entry-brief. Supply definitions, anchors, and constraints without selecting markets. |
| Customer jobs, behavior, demand explanations, interviews, VoC | customer-research. Reuse findings and request primary validation there. |
| ICP, personas, who to target, buying group | icp-and-buyer-personas. An observed population is not our selected target. |
| Alternative universe, competitor facts/offers/claims/changes | competitor-profiling. Reuse dossiers and request focused verification. |
| Our category/frame and strategic differentiation | positioning-strategy. Describe conventions without choosing our category. |
| Messaging architecture | messaging-framework. Research terminology does not authorize message changes. |
| Pricing/packaging and willingness-to-pay conclusions | pricing-strategy. Attention or spending is not willingness to pay. |
| GTM, investment, or roadmap decisions | go-to-market-strategy and relevant business/product decision owners. Return hypotheses, not commitments. |
| Cross-domain integration, consolidated gaps, goal-relative readiness | product-marketing-context. Return domain analysis without becoming an orchestrator. |
| Approved canon, approval, persistence | ssot-context-loop. Human approval remains required for canonical changes. |
Never write canonical files, decisions, manifests, or state.md. Market/category findings may support living evidence proposals. Accepted market boundaries may use SSOT-owned scoped decision/reference records. Our category choice remains a positioning proposal for its existing core home. Suggested destinations are unapproved and grant no permission to persist.
Deliver and save
Return to the originating PMC workflow or named requester. Attach the specialist packet from research-return.md to the domain artifact. An inconclusive result may complete research without making the downstream decision ready.
When saving is requested or workflow-authorized, use the user's existing research location for a noncanonical artifact. Do not create an intelligence SSOT or write into this repository during production runs. A research question or cadence does not authorize outreach, spending, installed monitoring, or sending alerts.
Output rules
- Open internal deliverables with Inputs and assumptions.
- Use Sourced / Assumed / Gap with kind, confidence/rationale, and limitations.
- Expose derivations and labeled inputs; Derived is not a fourth evidence tag.
- Preserve relevant thin-evidence hypotheses and say how to test them.
- End with ranked Evidence gaps: top five in the body, every remainder in an appendix. Give owners and resolution milestones, explicitly marking suggested assignments.
- Use no em dashes. Keep sentences short and bullets led by outcomes.
