intelligence-collection-disciplines

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

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
• Job posts naming specific technologies → confirmed stack choices → integration roadmap intel
• 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.

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.

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.

Fusion template — detecting [TARGET]'s [CAPABILITY] play:

Fusion verdict: ____ disciplines, one story → confidence level → recommended response.

The fusion cadence:

• Weekly: SIGINT sweep (site diffs, pricing, job posts). 30 minutes.
• Monthly: OSINT + HUMINT digest. Review mining, employee sentiment, conference intel.
• Quarterly: FININT + TECHINT deep pass. Filings, patents, procurement awards.
• Annual + every TAM refresh: GEOINT/DEMOINT pass. Statistics releases lag; sizing rot is slow but real.
• Event-driven: MASINT alerts, material filings, leadership exits. React within 48 hours.

Mapping disciplines to PM artifacts

Regional note

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
• tam-sam-som-calculator (Component) — consumes the GEOINT/DEMOINT sizing recipe
• company-research and company-intel — single-company deep dives built largely on OSINT + FININT + HUMINT
• Investigation skills that run these disciplines: market-landscape-scan, competitive-research-snapshot, competitive-intel-watch, battle-card-builder
• SCIP Code of Ethics — the competitive-intelligence profession's reference standard
• Regional Source Overlays (EU/MENA companion; planned as a future component skill)
• Adapted from practitioner experience in competitive and market intelligence, drawing on open-source intelligence practice.