• Governing protocol: this skill honors the

  autonomous-investigation

  contract — question budget of 3, search-plan gate, Fact/Inference/Assumption labels, Just Enough Mode, stable schema, 4-option Final Step.
• Discipline mix: primarily OSINT (analyst and review coverage, press, communities) with GEOINT/DEMOINT for segment reality-checks and FININT for funding signals — see

  intelligence-collection-disciplines

  .
• Buyer-view segmentation. Map the market as buyers experience it, not as vendors or analysts carve it — and note where the two disagree. Analyst quadrants are a map someone else drew for their own purposes; the disagreement between vendor categories and buyer reality is often where the opportunity hides.
• Non-consumption is a competitor. "They use spreadsheets" belongs on the player map. Treating substitutes and non-consumption as competitors is the most commercially useful habit in market analysis — the biggest rival is usually the status quo, and it never shows up in a quadrant.
• The dead-zone test. Every whitespace claim must survive the question "or is it a dead zone?" Empty space is either opportunity or evidence of no demand; the honest counter-reading is mandatory, not optional.
• Do-not-invent list (this domain's fabrication risks): companies, products, funding rounds, market share, growth rates, customer claims.

1. Credit inline context, then ask only the unanswered questions (max 3):
   1. What market or problem space, in your words?
   2. What decision should this landscape support?
   3. Any boundary — geography, buyer size, price band? If unanswered, proceed with labeled assumptions.
2. Show the 3-bullet search plan — what you'll search, source types (analyst and review sites, company and pricing pages, funding databases, industry press, trade bodies, practitioner communities), and how facts will be separated from inference. Continue unless revised.
3. Research in Just Enough Mode and emit the schema below exactly — it is the stable base that quarterly re-scans diff against.

• [3-5 segments as buyers experience them, each 1 bullet]
• [Where vendor categories disagree with buyer reality: 1 bullet]

• [Name]: [who they serve; wedge; 1 momentum signal; URL]

• [Name]: [why adjacency matters; URL]

• [What buyers do instead]: [why it persists]

• [Name]: [what bet they're making; funding/traction signal; URL]

• Where the money is: [2 bullets, labeled]
• Where the momentum is: [2 bullets, labeled]
• Consolidation or fragmentation: [1 bullet]
• Technology or regulatory shifts in play: [1-2 bullets]

• [Apparent gap]: opportunity or dead zone? [evidence either way]
• [2-3 of these, each with the honest counter-reading]

• 3 implications for the decision named in Scope
• 2 players to deep-dive next
• 3 assumptions to validate Each bullet: label, confidence, URL where relevant.

A copy/paste fill-in version of this schema, with quality checks, lives in [`template.md`](template.md).

1. Run

   competitive-research-snapshot

   on the deep-dive players
2. Run

   tam-sam-som-calculator

   sizing on the most promising segment
3. Draft a positioning hypothesis against this landscape (

   positioning-statement

   )
4. Schedule-ready version: what should a quarterly re-scan watch?

1

2

3

4

1 and 2

Verbose Mode

Vendors in this space market three categories: "observability platforms," "APM," and "log management." Buyers in practitioner forums segment differently — Fact (community thread, Jun 2026): by who gets paged (dev-owned vs. ops-owned) and by cost model tolerance (per-seat vs. per-GB). Two "different" vendor categories compete head-to-head for dev-owned/per-seat buyers — Inference (same buyers evaluating both in review-site comparisons). The category language is marketing architecture, not market structure.

Apparent gap: nobody serves sub-50-employee agencies at self-serve pricing. Opportunity or dead zone? Two prior entrants targeted exactly this and pivoted upmarket within 18 months — Fact (funding announcements, URLs). Their stated reason was willingness-to-pay, not demand — Inference (founder postmortem cites CAC/LTV, not lack of interest). Verdict: conditional whitespace — viable only with a radically cheaper acquisition motion. Assumption to validate: the segment's tooling budget clears $50/month.

examples/sample.md

competitive-research-snapshot

examples/sample-industrial.md

• Adopting the analyst map. Reciting a quadrant is not a landscape scan — quadrants exclude substitutes, lag emerging entrants, and segment by what's convenient to rank. Use them as one OSINT source, labeled, never as the frame.
• Omitting non-consumption. A player map without "what buyers do instead" flatters every vendor on it and hides the real competitor: inertia.
• Whitespace romanticism. Declaring every empty cell an opportunity. If the counter-reading is missing, the analysis is a pitch, not intelligence.
• Player-map sprawl. Twenty players with two facts each beats nothing, but twelve with the strongest signal each beats it badly. The cap is the discipline.
• Scope drift between re-scans. Changing the boundary or schema between runs silently breaks comparability — a re-scan of a different scope is a new baseline, and should say so.

• autonomous-investigation

  (Workflow) — the governing protocol

• intelligence-collection-disciplines

  (Component) — discipline sources and signal chains

• competitive-research-snapshot

  (Workflow) — deep-dive on the players this scan surfaces

• tam-sam-som-calculator

  (Component) — sizes the segments this scan maps

• positioning-statement

  (Component) — positions against this landscape
• Adapted from

  market-intelligence/market-landscape-scan-prompt.md

  in the

  https://github.com/deanpeters/product-manager-prompts

  repo.