Market Research

Required: decision and audience, buyer segment and geography, period currency units and source cutoff, available evidence and source boundary, research budget and stop condition. Output: market scope and source ledger, TAM SAM SOM model and sensitivity, customer evidence and JTBD matrix, comparable competitor and pricing profiles, decision-ready market findings.

HOLD: Missing inputs or failed contract gates. Prepared OMH routing is not execution or approval.

Why This Exists

omh-market-research turns a broad market question into bounded sizing, customer evidence, and comparable competitive analysis that a decision owner can inspect without mistaking secondary research for validation.

First Steps

• Confirm the decision, buyer/segment, geography, period, currency/base year, units/denominator, source cutoff, budget, and stop condition before retrieval. Mark missing inputs unknown; ask the one that changes the analysis first.
• Read references/findings-template.md to open the ledger, then load only the needed methods: references/market-sizing.md, references/customer-evidence.md, or references/competitive-pricing.md. Do not manufacture empty analysis lanes for an out-of-scope question.

Contract: references/full-contract.md, loaded before analysis. Procedure: references/procedure.md. These are working methods, not an OMH runtime operation.

Safety Rules

• Never invent figures or quotes, customer participants, market shares, traffic/revenue estimates, source IDs, or tool results. Label unsupported inputs unknown rather than borrowing a generic industry ratio.
• Outreach, participant recruitment, payments, and scheduling each require separate explicit approval; research approval is not permission to contact people, buy reports, run surveys, or create jobs.
• Keep contact details, raw recordings, private transcripts, and sensitive customer data outside durable artifacts; use consented bounded summaries and pseudonymous IDs with access-controlled source pointers.
• A prepared analysis is not retrieval, interviews, willingness to pay, customer validation, product-market fit, or an approved investment decision. No external tool, paid dataset, or MCP integration is mandatory.

When to Use

Use when the task needs market-specific analysis of addressable demand, customer jobs and pains, or comparable competitor and pricing evidence, not merely a generic brief or source list.

Strong routing signals: market-research, market sizing, tam sam som, bottom up market sizing, market size sensitivity, customer evidence analysis, jtbd evidence matrix, competitor pricing profiles, competitive pricing analysis

Catalog Metadata

Category: research Phase: market-analysis Hermes role: researcher Quality tier: source-gated

Completion Checklist

• The scope, units, source cutoff and stop reason are explicit, and every material finding links sources or labeled assumptions.
• Requested methods include source coverage, contrary evidence and confidence limits; unrequested lanes are marked not requested, not completed.
• Calculation receipts, unresolved retrieval gaps and customer sample limitations are attached; unknowns remain unknown.
• Decision implications name verification needs and an owner, never an automatic discovery, outreach, payment, scheduling or coding action.

Recovery Notes

• If retrieval fails, record the source ID, attempted date, failure and uncovered period; seek an allowed alternative once within budget or leave the finding unresolved.
• If sources disagree, compare definitions, geography, units and dates before choosing; preserve both ranges when they cannot be reconciled.
• If customer evidence is absent, prepare a consent-aware evidence request and leave the JTBD hypothesis unvalidated, never generate participant answers.

Workflow Lane

• Current lane: Research and company ops (product-docs, source-finder, web-research, research, model-optimization, inference-serving, model-finetuning, research-brief, +26 more) - research, signals, ops, and briefings.
• If intent belongs to another lane, hand back to oh-my-hermes or name the adjacent workflow.
• Shared product, routing, compatibility, and evidence rules: skill_view(name='omh-routing', file_path='references/skill-common-rail.md').

Runtime Evidence

Preferred harness for this skill: business-research.

omh runtime record --skill market-research --harness business-research --status started

Record observed delegation results; otherwise return not_available or not_observed. Prepared OMH routing is not execution, review, CI, merge-readiness, or merge evidence.

• Treat wrapper memory/context summaries as advisory local context, not proof of opaque Hermes memory reads or changes. Preserve workflow intent and stop conditions; verify before claiming completion. Reply in the user's own words and the host's own voice: its SOUL.md persona owns reply language, tone, speech level, and sentence endings, progress updates included (where it sets no language, use the one the user wrote in), and OMH shapes structure and content only; OMH's record terms (surface, lane, wrapper, handoff, evidence boundary, not_observed) stay in records and tool calls, never in the sentence the user reads unless they ask about one; and when a real unresolved user decision or a useful briefing discussion remains, offer one specific, content-linked question. Completed work needs no question; omit unrelated non-action footers and generic offers to continue.

Use Hermes-native subagent/delegation features when available: native subagents -> Hermes delegation when available, otherwise sequential lanes.

Shared product, compatibility, topology, memory, harness, and execution rules: skill_view(name='omh-routing', file_path='references/skill-common-rail.md'). Load it when applicable; otherwise name an unavailable capability.