porters-five-forces

name	porters-five-forces
argument-hint	[industry or segment, and the decision it supports]
description	Read an industry's structure through Porter's Five Forces with documented signals per rating, ending at the profit pool. Use when weighing market entry or when margins erode and nobody can say why.
intent	An evidence-cited five-forces read: rivalry, new entrants, substitutes (with AI-driven substitution named explicitly), buyer power, and supplier power — each force rated weak/moderate/strong with the documented signals that justify the rating, closing with where the profit pool sits and who is squeezing it.
type	workflow
theme	market-intelligence
best_for	["Pressure-testing a market-entry decision against the industry's actual structure","Explaining margin erosion structurally instead of blaming execution","Grounding strategy debates in rated forces with evidence, not vibes"]
scenarios	["We're considering entering the clinical-data-management space — what does its structure do to everyone who plays?","Our margins keep compressing and every explanation is tactical; give me the structural read"]
estimated_time	25-40 min per run

Porter's Five Forces (Evidence-Cited)

Purpose

Read an industry's structure through Porter's Five Forces, with evidence: search plan → force-by-force ratings with signals → profit-pool implication → next-step options. Each force — competitive rivalry, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, buyer power, supplier power — is rated weak/moderate/strong and justified with documented signals, because a rating without signals is vibes. The analysis closes where it should have been aiming all along: where the profit pool sits and who is squeezing it. Five forces is an argument about where margin goes, not a diagram for slide four.

Input

Works best with: the industry or segment, named as precisely as you can ("clinical data management SaaS," not "healthcare"), and the decision this analysis should support. Also useful: a geographic boundary if the structure differs by region, and a market-landscape-scan in session — the forces read builds on it and searches only gaps.

Input supplied inline with the invocation — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as answers already given. Use it against the question budget; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill opens with at most 3 questions (segment, decision, boundary) and proceeds on labeled assumptions if they go unanswered.

Example invocation: Five forces on mid-market field-service management software, North America — decision: whether we enter or partner.

Key Concepts

• Governing protocol: honors the autonomous-investigation contract — question budget of 3, search-plan gate, Fact/Inference/Assumption labels, Just Enough Mode (2-4 signals per force), stable schema, 4-option Final Step. Disciplines: FININT (concentration, margins, filings) + OSINT (analyst coverage, trade press) per intelligence-collection-disciplines.
• The framework (Porter, 1979): industry profitability is determined by five structural forces, not by how hard incumbents work. Rivalry sets the intensity of margin competition; entry threat caps pricing; substitutes cap value; buyer power extracts margin downstream; supplier power extracts it upstream. Structure explains what negotiation skill cannot: pricing power is structural.
• Ratings must survive "how do you know?" Each weak/moderate/strong rating stands on documented signals — concentration data, switching costs, entry examples and how they fared, substitute adoption curves, margin trends. Forces-with-signals is the difference between naming a framework and using one.