CIS Pipeline (Context → Information → Synthesis)

What It Is

Kelly's structured research pipeline with three phases and an explicit gate between phases:

  1. Context — gather requirements, define the research question, identify information sources
  2. Information — collect data from web search, APIs, documents, transcripts
  3. Synthesis — distill findings into a structured output (research-summary.md)

Gate: READY / NOT-READY — work cannot advance past Research until the gate passes.

Key Patterns

  • Each phase produces a named artifact
  • Gate is binary: ready to advance or not
  • Failed gate → rework the phase, don't skip ahead
  • Synthesis output includes confidence level and known gaps

How It Applies to Marketing Factory

Marketing research (competitor analysis, channel benchmarking, audience profiling) should use CIS:
- Context: Define the marketing question (e.g., "what channels work for mid-market PLG SaaS?")
- Information: Search, scrape, survey existing data
- Synthesis: Produce a marketing brief or channel recommendation

  • software-factory-pattern — CIS is the Research stage in the factory pipeline
  • tea-audit — TEA is the Testing-stage equivalent of CIS
  • quick-path — well-defined marketing tasks skip CIS and go straight to execution