diligence-plan

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

1. Identify the decision, decision owner, deadline, and viable alternatives.
2. State the target, transaction or relationship, stage, geography, and time horizon.
3. Convert the decision into 3-7 testable investment or operating hypotheses.
4. 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.
5. For every question, define the evidence that would confirm it, disconfirm it, and materially change the decision.
6. Rank work by decision impact, uncertainty, and cost to resolve. Front-load fatal-flaw questions.
7. 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:

1. Decision statement and success criteria
2. Scope and exclusions
3. Hypothesis table with confidence and disconfirming evidence
4. Prioritized question matrix with owner, source, and deadline
5. Data request list
6. Interview plan
7. Initial risk register
8. Stop/go gates and final deliverables

Use the planning template when the user has not supplied a format.