Market Entry Risk Map Prompt

Objective
Develop an evidence-traceable market entry risk map for [Market entry decision] in [Target market], covering the offering and intended customers described in [Offering and customer]. The result must support a go, conditional go, pilot, defer, or no-go decision without presenting unverified assumptions as facts.

Decision context
- Business context and baseline: [Business context and baseline]
- Constraints and risk appetite: [Constraints and risk appetite]
- Evidence pack: [Evidence pack]
- Decision criteria and thresholds: [Decision criteria and thresholds]
- Authorized research scope: [Authorized research scope]
- Time horizon and launch options: [Time horizon and launch options]

Input requirements
Treat the target market, offering, customer segment, intended entry decision, decision horizon, material constraints, and at least a preliminary evidence pack as minimum inputs. If the geography, customer, offering, decision owner, or decision horizon is missing or materially ambiguous, ask only the questions required to proceed reliably.

Useful but non-blocking context includes current-market performance, pricing, customer interviews, market studies, competitor data, channel proposals, financial assumptions, legal memoranda, operating capabilities, partner diligence, and prior experiments. When optional information is absent, continue with a bounded assessment, mark the affected conclusion as unknown or provisional, and specify the evidence needed to resolve it.

Gemini operating rules
1. Analyze the supplied materials directly. If Gemini has an enabled browsing or search capability and public research is authorized, use it only within [Authorized research scope]. Cite the exact URL, publisher, publication date, access date, and relevant claim for each external source.
2. Do not imply access to private systems, paid databases, customer records, local experts, regulators, or documents that were not supplied or retrieved during the session.
3. Do not contact customers, competitors, partners, authorities, or employees; purchase research; submit filings; approve budgets; sign agreements; publish findings; or initiate a launch. Describe these only as proposed actions requiring an identified human owner and authorization.
4. Never claim that research was conducted, demand was validated, counsel approved a position, a partner was vetted, or a launch was completed unless the action actually occurred and supporting evidence is available in the session.

Evidence and uncertainty rules
- Classify every material input or conclusion as supplied fact, externally sourced observation, calculation, assumption, hypothesis, unknown, or conflicting evidence.
- For each source, assess recency, geographic relevance, segment fit, methodology, independence, and likely bias. Do not treat search snippets, uncited market-size claims, promotional vendor material, or a single interview as conclusive evidence.
- Preserve disagreements between sources. Explain whether they arise from different definitions, dates, segments, currencies, sampling methods, or incentives rather than silently selecting a preferred figure.
- Show formulas and units for market sizing, pricing, margins, acquisition costs, payback, cash requirements, and currency conversions. Separate total addressable market from realistically serviceable and obtainable demand.
- Use ranges or scenarios when point estimates are not defensible. State confidence as high, medium, or low and justify it through evidence quality, not rhetorical certainty.
- Label all legal, tax, licensing, sanctions, employment, competition, privacy, consumer-protection, and sector-regulatory interpretations as issues for qualified local review unless supported by current, applicable professional advice supplied in the evidence pack.

Assessment workflow
1. Frame the decision boundary. Define the target geography, customer segment, use case, entry mode, launch horizon, capital at risk, reversibility, decision owner, and available alternatives. Translate [Decision criteria and thresholds] into measurable gates. Flag criteria that cannot yet be measured.
2. Build an evidence ledger. Inventory every material document, dataset, interview, calculation, and public source. Record its claim, date, geography, segment, evidence class, reliability limitations, and which decision question it informs. Identify stale, missing, duplicated, or contradictory evidence.
3. Test customer demand. Examine the problem's frequency and severity, willingness to pay, buyer and user roles, procurement cycle, switching costs, localization needs, retention drivers, adoption barriers, and evidence of paid demand. Distinguish stated interest from signed commitments, completed purchases, repeat usage, or other behavioral evidence.
4. Map competitors and substitutes. Compare direct competitors, indirect substitutes, incumbent workflows, likely new entrants, price points, positioning, distribution advantages, customer lock-in, regulatory standing, and plausible responses to entry. Avoid inferring market share or competitor capability without support.
5. Assess route to market. Evaluate direct sales, digital acquisition, marketplaces, distributors, resellers, strategic partners, and other relevant channels for reach, cost, control, speed, exclusivity, concentration, incentive alignment, attribution, and dependency risk. Identify channel conflicts and single points of failure.
6. Model commercial viability. Test market-size logic, achievable penetration, pricing, discounts, taxes, payment costs, gross margin, customer acquisition cost, sales-cycle length, churn or repeat purchase, contribution margin, payback, working capital, setup cost, and downside cash exposure. Present base, upside, and downside cases using consistent units and assumptions.
7. Review regulatory and legal exposure. Identify likely licenses, registrations, product restrictions, data-residency or privacy duties, consumer rules, advertising limits, employment issues, tax exposure, import or export controls, sanctions, anti-bribery concerns, intellectual-property risks, and contractual dependencies. State jurisdictional uncertainty and the required local specialist or authority confirmation.
8. Test operating readiness. Assess localization, product changes, service capacity, talent, suppliers, logistics, payment rails, fraud controls, cybersecurity, data handling, quality assurance, support coverage, business continuity, foreign-exchange exposure, and dependencies on headquarters or third parties.
9. Build the risk model. Score each risk for likelihood and impact on a clearly defined scale, calculate inherent exposure, list existing controls, estimate residual exposure only when control effectiveness has evidence, and record velocity, detectability, owner, trigger, mitigation, contingency, decision gate, and review date. Do not hide low-probability risks with catastrophic legal, safety, liquidity, or reputational impact inside an average score.
10. Examine interactions and scenarios. Identify correlated risks and feedback loops, such as weak demand increasing channel dependence, regulatory delay extending cash burn, or currency depreciation eroding margins. Stress-test the assumptions most capable of reversing the decision.
11. Compare entry options. Assess relevant modes such as research-only, limited experiment, controlled pilot, partner-led entry, phased launch, acquisition, full launch, defer, and no-go. Compare expected value, evidence gained, cost, speed, control, reversibility, and worst credible downside.
12. Form the recommendation. Select go, conditional go, pilot, defer, or no-go only by reference to the stated thresholds. If evidence is insufficient, recommend the smallest reversible validation step rather than manufacturing certainty. Identify assumptions that would reverse the recommendation.

Safety, authority, and stop conditions
- Minimize personal, confidential, and commercially sensitive data. Do not reproduce unnecessary personal identifiers, credentials, private customer records, trade secrets, or restricted information. Recommend redaction or aggregation when possible.
- Do not recommend deceptive research, unauthorized scraping, competitor impersonation, collusion, discriminatory targeting, bribery, sanctions evasion, regulatory avoidance, or use of data without a lawful basis.
- Require human approval before spending funds, engaging external parties, collecting personal data, changing production systems, signing commitments, making public claims, entering regulated activity, or launching a market test.
- Stop and mark the assessment blocked if the proposed entry appears unlawful, depends on unauthorized data or actions, creates an uncontrolled safety or solvency risk, or lacks a required approval. State the escalation owner and evidence needed to resume.
- For a proposed pilot, include exposure limits, budget and duration caps, participant protections, monitoring triggers, pause criteria, data retention rules, and an exit or rollback plan.

Required deliverable
Produce the following sections in order:

1. Decision brief
State the market-entry decision, target market and segment, evaluated entry modes, recommendation, confidence, capital or exposure boundary, three strongest supporting points, three principal reservations, and approvals still required.

2. Scope and decision gates
Provide a table with decision criterion, threshold, current observation, evidence reference, status as met, not met, unknown, or conflicting, and consequence for the decision.

3. Evidence ledger
Provide a table with evidence ID, claim or observation, source, date, geography and segment, evidence class, quality limitations, conflicts, and conclusion supported. Clearly mark unavailable evidence.

4. Market and customer findings
Report demand signals, customer jobs and barriers, buyer journey, willingness-to-pay evidence, market sizing with formulas, localization needs, and unresolved customer questions. Separate observed behavior from stated intent.

5. Competitive and channel map
Provide one table for competitors and substitutes and another for channels. Include evidence-backed differentiation, pricing where available, switching costs, channel economics, dependencies, concentration, and likely response risks.

6. Commercial scenario model
Provide base, upside, and downside cases with assumptions for volume, price, discounts, currency, revenue, variable costs, gross margin, acquisition cost, retention or repeat purchase, payback, setup cost, working capital, and cash at risk. Show calculations, units, source references, and sensitivity to the most decision-critical assumptions.

7. Regulatory, legal, and operational readiness map
For each material issue, state the applicable activity, present understanding, jurisdiction, evidence, uncertainty, required specialist review or approval, operational dependency, and whether it blocks a pilot or full launch.

8. Prioritized risk register
Provide risk ID, category, cause, event, consequence, likelihood, impact, inherent rating, control and control evidence, residual rating or unknown, velocity, detectability, correlated risks, owner, mitigation, contingency, trigger, decision gate, and review date. Explain the scoring scale and escalation threshold.

9. Entry-option comparison
Compare each viable entry mode on evidence gained, cost, time, control, reversibility, dependencies, expected upside, worst credible downside, and threshold status. Explain why the preferred option dominates or why no option is currently acceptable.

10. Validation and approval plan
List each unresolved assumption, validation method, metric, pass and fail threshold, minimum credible sample or observation period where defensible, owner, authorization needed, cost or exposure cap, stop condition, expected evidence artifact, and decision affected.

11. Verification and acceptance record
Provide a table with check, expected condition, actual observation from available evidence, evidence reference, status, and remediation. At minimum verify source traceability, source recency and segment fit, market-size arithmetic, scenario-unit consistency, currency and tax treatment, risk-score calculations, coverage of material risk categories, reconciliation of conflicting claims, ownership of critical mitigations, approval gates, pilot stop conditions, and alignment between the recommendation and [Decision criteria and thresholds]. Use not verified rather than pass when evidence is unavailable.

12. Decision handoff
List the recommended decision, decision owner, approvals required, blocking unknowns, non-blocking unknowns, immediate reversible next step, conditions for revisiting the decision, and artifacts to retain. Keep proposed, authorized, executed, measured, verified, and approved states explicitly separate.