Run competitive research like an intelligence agency: eight collection disciplines (OSINT to MASINT), signal-to-inference chains, and fusion. Use when one-source research isn't enough.
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Run competitive research like an intelligence agency: eight collection disciplines (OSINT to MASINT), signal-to-inference chains, and fusion. Use when one-source research isn't enough.
intent
Give product managers the intelligence community's collection playbook: eight independent disciplines, each with free and paid sources, signal-to-inference chains, and the PM artifact it feeds — then fuse them with confidence stacking so three weak signals become one strong conclusion.
type
component
theme
market-intelligence
best_for
["Choosing which collection channels to run for a competitive or market question","Turning raw public signals (patents, job posts, filings, web diffs) into defensible inferences","Cross-validating a suspected competitor move across independent evidence channels"]
scenarios
["I think a competitor is building a platform play — how do I confirm it before their launch?","My TAM slide got shredded — where do I find data that survives scrutiny?"]
estimated_time
reference skill; a single-discipline pass takes 30-60 min
Intelligence Collection Disciplines
Purpose
Stop doing competitive research like a term paper. The intelligence community solved this problem
decades ago: they don't collect "data," they run collection disciplines — independent channels,
each with its own sources, tradecraft, and blind spots — and then they fuse them. This skill gives
product managers that playbook: eight disciplines, each telling you (1) what to collect, (2) where to
collect it, (3) which signal → inference chains to run, and (4) which PM artifact it feeds
(TAM/SAM/SOM, ICPs, personas, battle cards, roadmap bets, win/loss, positioning, pricing). One signal
is an anecdote; three correlated signals from independent disciplines is intelligence.
Input
Works best with the six instantiation variables below — fill them once and every discipline
becomes engagement-specific. Leave them blank and this stays a teaching artifact.
[TARGET] = The competitor, partner, or acquirer you're researching
[MARKET] = The category and its NAICS/SIC/NACE codes (or nearest equivalent)
[GEOGRAPHY] = Regions in scope, at COUNTRY level, not continent level
[BUYER] = Who signs the check (drives review sites, job titles, conferences)
[CAPABILITY] = The strategic move you suspect (platform play, market entry,
pricing shift, compliance land-grab, etc.)
[DECISION] = What this research will change (roadmap bet, positioning,
pricing, market entry, deal defense, ICP refresh)
If [DECISION] is blank, stop. Research without a decision is a hobby.
Anything supplied with the invocation itself — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an
appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as variables already filled. Use it; don't re-ask.
Arriving empty-handed? That works too. Read the disciplines as a course in tradecraft, or ask the
agent to walk the instantiation block with you one variable at a time.
Example invocation:Use intelligence-collection-disciplines — [TARGET]: Meridian Freight Systems, [CAPABILITY]: suspected move into warehouse robotics, [DECISION]: whether we accelerate our own integration roadmap.
Key Concepts
The Eight Disciplines
Discipline
Intel Community Name
Plain English
Primary PM Artifact
1. OSINT
Open Source Intelligence
Press, social, periodicals, analysts
Battle cards, positioning
2. FININT
Financial Intelligence
Filings, earnings calls, procurement
Battle cards, SOM capture rates
3. GEOINT/DEMOINT
Geospatial & Demographic Intelligence
Census, labor, trade, economic statistics
TAM/SAM/SOM, ICPs, personas
4. TECHINT
Technical Intelligence
Patents, technographics, changelogs
Roadmap bets
5. HUMINT
Human Intelligence
Talent moves, employee chatter, win/loss
Roadmap bets, battle cards
6. SIGINT
Signals Intelligence
Web diffs, pricing changes, job posts
Battle cards, pricing strategy
7. MASINT
Measurement & Signature
Supply chain, ops indicators
Threat assessment
8. All-Source Fusion
n/a
Cross-validation and confidence stacking
Everything above
Independence is the design. The disciplines matter because they fail differently: a press
release can lie, but a customs record, a patent filing, and thirty job posts are three separate
bureaucracies that would all have to be lying in the same direction.
Signal → inference chains are the tradecraft: each observable signal maps to a bounded
interpretation, labeled per the autonomous-investigation protocol (Fact / Inference / Assumption).
What this is NOT: espionage. Every source below is published, filed, posted, or publicly
observable. See Guardrails in Common Pitfalls.
Application
1. OSINT — The Journalist's Desk
What a good beat reporter knows before the press release drops.
Source Type
Free
Paid
[TARGET] press & newsroom
Company newsroom pages, Google Alerts, PR Newswire feeds
Meltwater, Cision
Industry periodicals
Trade publications, association newsletters, vertical Substacks for [MARKET]
Webinar topics shifting → what they're teaching the market is what they're about to sell
Sudden silence on a product line → sunset in progress
Prediction-market odds moving on a regulation or milestone that gates [MARKET] → crowd-priced expectations for scenario planning; treat as a leading indicator of consensus, not ground truth, and check liquidity before trusting the number
Feeds: battle cards (objection handling from review mining), positioning (their words vs. customer words gap), win/loss context.
2. FININT — The Forensic Accountant
Follow the money. Companies lie in press releases. They lie less in filings, because lying there is a felony.
Source Type
Free
Paid
Public filings
SEC EDGAR (US), Companies House (UK), BRIS and European e-Justice company search (EU), national securities regulators for [GEOGRAPHY]
USAspending.gov, SAM.gov (US), TED and national procurement portals (EU), country platforms (MENA), development-bank procurement (World Bank, EBRD, AfDB, UNGM)
GovWin
Competition & state-aid cases
European Commission merger/antitrust/state-aid databases; national competition authorities
n/a
State & sovereign capital
Sovereign wealth fund reports, state-owned enterprise annual reports, PPP pipelines
n/a
Signal → inference chains:
Risk Factors section changes year-over-year in an annual filing → what genuinely scares them (they must disclose it)
Earnings call Q&A dodges (analysts ask, execs deflect) → soft spot; probe it in your positioning
New entity registrations or branches in [GEOGRAPHY] → market entry before any announcement
Deferred revenue trends → actual sales momentum vs. stated momentum
Merger filings → market definitions and named competitors, straight from [TARGET]'s own lawyers
Sovereign fund or state-aid money backing [TARGET] → their runway math just changed; discount-pressure plays won't work
Prior Information Notices and expressions of interest → tenders telegraphed 3-24 months out
Feeds: battle cards (financial stress = "they'll be desperate at quarter-end" plays), SOM capture
rates (their revenue ÷ claimed customer count = deal size reality check, feeding the GEOINT/DEMOINT
sizing recipe), account targeting (procurement award patterns).
3. GEOINT/DEMOINT — The Cartographer
The terrain map, not troop movement. Government statistics are free intelligence most PMs never open —
and the backbone of every ICP, persona, and TAM that survives scrutiny.
Source Type
Free
Paid
US market structure
Census Bureau (County Business Patterns, Economic Census, NAICS establishment counts), BEA
IBISWorld, Statista, Grand View Research
US labor & buyers
BLS (occupation counts, wages, industry employment), FRED (macro conditions gating budgets)
TalentNeuron
EU market structure
Eurostat, PRODCOM manufacturing statistics, national statistical institutes, ECB data
national data resellers
EU trade flows
Eurostat COMEXT, Access2Markets, TARIC (tariffs, quotas, rules of origin)
Panjiva, S&P Global
MENA regional
GCC-Stat, Arab Development Portal, ESCWA, Arab Monetary Fund, SESRIC
n/a
MENA national
GASTAT (Saudi), FCSC (UAE), CAPMAS (Egypt), HCP (Morocco), and peers
n/a
Global cross-check
World Bank Data and Enterprise Surveys, IMF country reports, OECD.Stat, UN Comtrade, ITC Trade Map
n/a
Signal → inference chains:
Establishment counts by industry code and employee band → the denominator for bottom-up TAM
Regional industry concentration → where your SOM actually lives, and where field sales should live
Occupation growth curves for your [BUYER] roles → is the population you sell to growing or shrinking
Firmographic distributions (size bands, legal forms, sectors) → ICP boundaries drawn from data, not vibes
Buyer-title prevalence by [GEOGRAPHY] → persona localization; the "VP of Product" you message in Boston is a "Head of Digital" in Frankfurt and may not exist in Riyadh
Trade-flow shifts in product-specific codes → market entry or supply relocation before any announcement
The TAM/SAM/SOM Recipe (this discipline's signature dish):
TAM: Establishment counts for [MARKET] (Census/NAICS, Eurostat/NACE,
or national equivalent for [GEOGRAPHY])
× employment/spend benchmarks (BLS, Eurostat, trade associations)
(validate against two independent analyst reports; if they disagree by 3x, say so)
SAM: TAM filtered by your actual constraints: [GEOGRAPHY], segment, compliance
requirements, tech prerequisites (see TECHINT technographics),
local-content and vendor-registration eligibility where applicable
SOM: SAM × realistic capture rate derived from [TARGET] public filings via FININT
(their revenue ÷ their claimed customer count = deal size reality check)
Feeds: TAM/SAM/SOM (the backbone — see tam-sam-som-calculator), ICP definition, personas,
messaging localization, market entry prioritization, pricing corridor validation.
4. TECHINT — The Patent Examiner
R&D leaves fingerprints 12-18 months before products ship.
Source Type
Free
Paid
Patents
patents.google.com, USPTO Patent Center, EPO Espacenet, WIPO PatentScope
Clarivate, LexisNexis PatentSight+
Technographics
BuiltWith free lookups, Wappalyzer
HG Insights, BuiltWith Pro, 6sense
Product telemetry
Public changelogs, API docs diffs, status pages, GitHub org activity
n/a
Standards bodies
Whichever govern [MARKET]: IETF, W3C, ISO committees, CEN/CENELEC/ETSI work programs, industry consortia
n/a
Funded research
CORDIS and Horizon Europe project databases, university project repositories
n/a
Academic & preprints
arXiv, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, SSRN, the conferences that matter to [MARKET]
Dimensions, Scopus
Trademark filings
USPTO TESS, EUIPO, WIPO Global Brand Database
Corsearch
Signal → inference chains:
Patent clusters (5+ filings in one classification in 12 months) → committed bet on [CAPABILITY], not exploration
Inventor names repeating across filings → the actual product team behind the initiative; track their conference talks and LinkedIn
Trademark filing for a product-sounding name → launch inside 6-12 months (trademarks are cheap; companies file close to launch)
[TARGET] repeatedly appearing in funded consortia → their long-range bet, 12-48 months of lead time
Research pilot sites → likely launch customers, named in public deliverables
[TARGET] chairing a standards committee → they intend to shape the rules of [MARKET], not just play by them
[TARGET]-affiliated authors publishing preprints → R&D direction 6-24 months before patents; a paper cluster plus a hiring surge in the same specialty is one of the strongest fusion pairs available
Author affiliations shifting from university to [TARGET] on successive papers → they hired the lab, not just the idea
API docs adding endpoints for an unreleased capability → beta program running now
Your prospects' tech stacks (technographics) → your SAM refinement: who can actually buy you
Feeds: roadmap bets (where to accelerate vs. concede), SAM refinement, battle cards (feature-gap
countdown clocks), build/buy/partner decisions.
5. HUMINT — The Sports Scout
Organizations announce strategy through job boards long before press releases. People are the tell.
Source Type
Free
Paid
Job postings
LinkedIn Jobs, [TARGET] careers pages, Indeed
JobsPikr, TalentNeuron, Revelio Labs
Employee sentiment
Glassdoor, Blind, Reddit communities for [MARKET]
n/a
Leadership moves
LinkedIn announcements, press
BoardEx, The Org
Win/Loss
Your own sales team debriefs, churned-customer interviews
Clozd, DoubleCheck
Conference hallway
Your field team's ears at [MARKET] trade shows
n/a
Signal → inference chains:
Hiring surge in one specialty (30+ postings in a quarter) → building [CAPABILITY], not a feature
Regional specialist roles appearing for a [GEOGRAPHY] you haven't seen them in → expansion pre-announcement
Senior product/tech leader exits within 6 months of a strategy announcement → the strategy is in trouble
Your own alumni landing at [TARGET] → assume they know your playbook
Employee reviews mentioning "pivot," "reorg," "leadership churn" → 2 quarters of internal distraction = your window
Win/Loss interviews: the only source that tells you why deals actually close (everything else is inference)
Feeds: roadmap bets (their build signals), battle cards (org instability plays), win/loss program
(ground truth for everything).
6. SIGINT — The Wiretap You're Allowed to Have
Companies broadcast constantly through what they change on the public internet. Most competitors never listen.
Source Type
Free
Paid
Website diffs
Wayback Machine, Visualping free tier
Visualping, Klue, Crayon (auto-monitoring)
Pricing pages
Manual snapshots + Wayback
Klue, Crayon, Kompyte
SEO/SEM moves
Google "site:" queries, free Semrush lookups
Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu
App store metadata
Version notes, screenshot changes, keyword shifts
Sensor Tower, data.ai
DNS/infrastructure
crt.sh (new SSL certs reveal new subdomains), DNS records
n/a
Webinar/event cadence
[TARGET] events pages, registration platforms
n/a
Signal → inference chains:
New subdomain SSL cert (e.g., [capability].[target].com) → product launch staging, often weeks ahead
Pricing page removes a tier → packaging overhaul, usually toward enterprise
Sudden SEM bidding on your brand terms → they consider you the threat now (congratulations)
Case study page pattern shifts (new vertical or [GEOGRAPHY] appearing) → segment push
Messaging A/B visible via Wayback diffs → they're unsure of positioning; hit the wound
Feeds: battle cards (the freshest layer — this is what keeps cards from going stale), pricing
strategy, positioning counter-moves.
7. MASINT — The Satellite Photo
Measure the physical and operational exhaust. Abnormal resource allocation never lies.
Source Type
Free
Paid
Supply chain
Import/export records via ImportYeti (free tier), Eurostat COMEXT and customs codes, UN Comtrade
S&P Global Supply Chain Intelligence, Panjiva, ImportGenius
Facilities & projects
Commercial real estate news, local business journals, permits in [GEOGRAPHY]; industrial-zone tenant announcements, environmental permits, EPC contract awards; satellite imagery
CoStar
Ops capacity
Support response time sampling, status page incident frequency
n/a
Certifications & safety
Whichever gate [MARKET]: ISO, SOC 2, FedRAMP, CE marks; notified-body designations and safety recalls (EU); sector registries
n/a
Signal → inference chains:
20%+ volume change in critical inputs → pre-launch or demand collapse (check which via FININT)
New supplier geographies or country-of-origin shifts → market entry, tariff hedging, or resilience play
Compliance certification "in process" listings → 12-36 month runway into a regulated segment, visible to anyone who checks the registry
Product recalls or repeated safety-alert patterns → quality strain; battle card ammunition with a public citation
Land allocation, power/water capacity reservations, or engineering-design contracts preceding equipment procurement → facility buildout 6-36 months before any launch announcement
Support response times stretching + hiring freeze in support roles → cash constraint or overwhelmed by growth (disambiguate via employee sentiment)
Office consolidations → cost compression; expect pricing aggression to follow
Note: supply chain and facility signals are strongest for hardware and industrial players. The
software equivalent is ops capacity plus infrastructure-scale language in job postings.
Feeds: threat assessment, launch prediction and capacity estimates, battle cards (capacity-stretch
objections: "ask them about their support SLAs lately").
8. All-Source Fusion — The Situation Room
One signal is an anecdote. Three correlated signals from independent disciplines is intelligence.
Apply the Confidence Stacking Rule from the autonomous-investigation protocol: 1 discipline =
watch item; 2 = working hypothesis; 3+ = actionable intelligence; conflicting disciplines = someone is
bluffing — dig. And treat announcements as intent until funding, procurement, land, permits, hiring,
or contracts corroborate them: ambition is OSINT; commitment shows up in FININT, MASINT, and HUMINT.
The disciplines do not change across markets; the sources do, and so does the evidentiary burden. Two
lessons that generalize: in rich-disclosure systems (EU), the challenge is finding the right record in
a fragmented landscape — no single portal holds it all. In announcement-heavy markets (MENA), the
challenge is separating national ambition from funded, procured, permitted commitment — and an
announced budget, an approved budget, committed financing, a tender value, and an awarded contract are
five different numbers wearing the same headline. Search in local languages; never assume the English
portal contains every notice.
A copy/paste collection plan — instantiation variables, discipline-selection table, cadence,
and fusion table — lives in template.md.
Examples
Illustrative fusion fill (all names fictional): you suspect [TARGET] = Meridian Freight Systems is
building a warehouse-robotics platform. The sweep finds: +20% specialized component orders in customs
records (MASINT, Fact), 15 new filings in one robotics patent class (TECHINT, Fact), 30+
platform engineers hired in a quarter (HUMINT, Fact), a new robotics.meridianfreight.com SSL
cert (SIGINT, Fact), the CFO dodging an analyst's capex question (FININT, Inference), and
establishment counts confirming the addressable segment supports the investment math
(GEOINT/DEMOINT, Fact). Six disciplines, one story: high-confidence platform threat. Response:
accelerate your own platform roadmap and arm sales with a maturity battle card before their launch,
not after.
Single-discipline quick win: your battle card claims a competitor is "financially strong." One
FININT pass finds deferred revenue declining three quarters straight while claimed customer count grew
— Inference: deal sizes are shrinking. The card gains a quarter-end discount-pressure play, with
the filing URL attached.
See examples/sample.md for a complete worked collection plan (fictional) —
four disciplines chosen and three consciously skipped, a fusion table that escalates to
actionable, and a June signal that correctly stayed a watch item until other channels corroborated.
examples/sample-industrial.md is the plan where MASINT stars —
customs, registries, permits — and an absence enters the fusion table as a Fact.
Common Pitfalls
Feature-matching theater. The goal is never "they shipped X so we ship X." Signals inform
decisions about outcomes — "this changes which customer problem wins the next investment."
Single-discipline conviction. A hiring surge alone is a watch item, not a strategy brief.
Escalate confidence only as independent disciplines corroborate — that's the stacking rule.
Announcement inflation. Re-planning your roadmap around a press release. Ambition is OSINT;
wait for the money, the permits, or the hires.
Unsourced claims. A battle card assertion without a source and date is an opinion wearing a
badge. Document provenance on every claim; archive source documents at collection time, because
portals restructure and files get replaced.
Crossing the line. Pretexting, soliciting NDA-protected information, hiring someone specifically
to extract their former employer's secrets, scraping against terms you agreed to — all off-limits.
Everything in this skill is published, filed, posted, or publicly observable. The stage test: if
you'd be uncomfortable explaining your method at [TARGET]'s user conference, don't use it.
Running every discipline on every question. The artifact-mapping table exists so you run the two
or three disciplines that feed your [DECISION], on the cadence that matches how fast that evidence
actually changes.
References
autonomous-investigation (Workflow) — the protocol that
labels and stacks what these disciplines collect
