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.
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Slash command/intelligence-collection-disciplines
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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.
---name: intelligence-collection-disciplines
description: "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."
intent: >-
Give product managers the intelligence community's collection playbook: eight independent disciplines,
each with free and paid sources, signal-to-inference chains, and the PM artifact it feeds โ then fuse
them with confidence stacking so three weak signals become one strong conclusion.
type: component
theme: market-intelligence
best_for:
- "Choosing which collection channels to run for a competitive or market question"
- "Turning raw public signals (patents, job posts, filings, web diffs) into defensible inferences"
- "Cross-validating a suspected competitor move across independent evidence channels"
scenarios:
- "I think a competitor is building a platform play โ how do I confirm it before their launch?"
- "My TAM slide got shredded โ where do I find data that survives scrutiny?"
estimated_time: "reference skill; a single-discipline pass takes 30-60 min"
---# Intelligence Collection Disciplines
## Purpose
Stop doing competitive research like a term paper. The intelligence community solved this problem
- Webinar topics shifting โ what they're teaching the market is what they're about to sell
- Sudden silence on a product line โ sunset in progress
- Prediction-market odds moving on a regulation or milestone that gates [MARKET] โ 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 โ 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) |
sizing recipe), account targeting (procurement award patterns).
### 3. GEOINT/DEMOINT โ The Cartographer
*The terrain map, not troop movement. Government statistics are free intelligence most PMs never open โ
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 โ inference chains:**
- Establishment counts by industry code and employee band โ the denominator for bottom-up TAM
- Regional industry concentration โ where your SOM actually lives, and where field sales should live
- Occupation growth curves for your [BUYER] roles โ is the population you sell to growing or shrinking
- Firmographic distributions (size bands, legal forms, sectors) โ ICP boundaries drawn from data, not vibes
- Buyer-title prevalence by [GEOGRAPHY] โ 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 โ market entry or supply relocation before any announcement
- Patent **clusters** (5+ filings in one classification in 12 months) โ committed bet on [CAPABILITY], not exploration
- Inventor names repeating across filings โ the actual product team behind the initiative; track their conference talks and LinkedIn
- Trademark filing for a product-sounding name โ launch inside 6-12 months (trademarks are cheap; companies file close to launch)
- [TARGET] repeatedly appearing in funded consortia โ their long-range bet, 12-48 months of lead time
- Research pilot sites โ likely launch customers, named in public deliverables
- [TARGET] chairing a standards committee โ they intend to shape the rules of [MARKET], not just play by them
- [TARGET]-affiliated authors publishing preprints โ 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 โ they hired the lab, not just the idea
- API docs adding endpoints for an unreleased capability โ beta program running now
- Your prospects' tech stacks (technographics) โ 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 โ The Sports Scout
*Organizations announce strategy through job boards long before press releases. People are the tell.*
- 20%+ volume change in critical inputs โ pre-launch or demand collapse (check which via FININT)
- New supplier geographies or country-of-origin shifts โ market entry, tariff hedging, or resilience play
- Compliance certification "in process" listings โ 12-36 month runway into a regulated segment, visible to anyone who checks the registry
- Product recalls or repeated safety-alert patterns โ quality strain; battle card ammunition with a public citation
- Land allocation, power/water capacity reservations, or engineering-design contracts preceding equipment procurement โ facility buildout 6-36 months before any launch announcement
- Support response times stretching + hiring freeze in support roles โ cash constraint or overwhelmed by growth (disambiguate via employee sentiment)