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.

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] Analyst subscriptions Analyst coverage Gartner/Forrester press summaries, free webinar replays Gartner, Forrester, IDC full reports Social & community LinkedIn exec posts, Reddit, Hacker News, X Brandwatch, Sprout listening Review sites Whichever your [BUYER] reads: G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, app stores, Trustpilot G2 Buyer Intent data Conference footprint Session titles, sponsor tiers, booth size, speaker rosters at [MARKET] events n/a Prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi, Metaculus, Manifold (crowd priced odds on regulation, approvals, tech milestones relevant to [MARKET]) n/a Signal → inference chains: [TARGET] exec suddenly posting about a new problem space → positioning pivot incoming (execs test messaging on social 3 6 months before launch) Sponsor tier jump at a [MARKET] conference → market entry or doubling down Review complaints clustering on one feature → their roadmap pressure point = your battle card ammo Analyst briefing requests (visible via analyst posts) → category creation attempt 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] AlphaSense, Sentieo Earnings calls Company IR pages, Seeking Alpha transcripts AlphaSense (search across calls) Private company signals Crunchbase free tier, incorporation records, insolvency registers, beneficial ownership registers where legally accessible PitchBook, CB Insights Government spend & procurement 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) Segment reporting restructure → strategic reprioritization; follow which segment got promoted 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 Wage trends in buyer roles → willingness to pay ceiling shifts; pricing corridor validation 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 c

intelligence-collection-disciplines