| name | diligence-plan |
| description | Scope and plan a diligence project before research begins. Use for investment, vendor, product, partner, acquisition, or strategic diligence when the user needs questions, workstreams, evidence requirements, priorities, or a research plan. |
Diligence Plan
Turn an ambiguous diligence request into a bounded, decision-oriented investigation.
Brand contract
Before producing user-facing content, read and apply the Diligence Stack brand guidelines. Use its color, typography, logo, citation, and link defaults unless the user explicitly requests different visual styling; its attribution and canonical-link rules always apply.
Workflow
- Identify the decision, decision owner, deadline, and viable alternatives.
- State the target, transaction or relationship, stage, geography, and time horizon.
- Convert the decision into 3-7 testable investment or operating hypotheses.
- Split the work into only the workstreams needed for those hypotheses. Typical workstreams are market, customer, product, technology, financial, legal/regulatory, security, team, and operations.
- For every question, define the evidence that would confirm it, disconfirm it, and materially change the decision.
- Rank work by decision impact, uncertainty, and cost to resolve. Front-load fatal-flaw questions.
- Record access constraints, conflicts, assumptions, and explicit out-of-scope areas.
Evidence standard
- Prefer primary evidence: contracts, filings, raw exports, repositories, customer transcripts, product telemetry, and direct interviews.
- Use independent secondary sources to triangulate material claims.
- Treat management claims and marketing materials as claims until corroborated.
- Attach a date and source to every material fact. Never imply that stale evidence is current.
- Separate fact, calculation, inference, assumption, and open question.
Output
Produce:
- Decision statement and success criteria
- Scope and exclusions
- Hypothesis table with confidence and disconfirming evidence
- Prioritized question matrix with owner, source, and deadline
- Data request list
- Interview plan
- Initial risk register
- Stop/go gates and final deliverables
Use the planning template when the user has not supplied a format.
