Mariete method

Briefing and plan approval

Reference only. Project progress and credentials come from assessed work.

A useful Inspector task starts with enough context to plan correctly, but not with an unstructured data dump.

Use five parts:

Business context + decision + evidence + constraints + output
PartQuestion to answer
Business contextWhich company, market, customer and time period matter?
DecisionWhat will someone decide after reading the result?
EvidenceWhich files, systems or public sources are relevant?
ConstraintsWhat must not be accessed, changed, inferred or published?
OutputWhich deliverable and level of evidence are required?

A strong brief

We are a 70-person B2B SaaS company preparing a board discussion on rising mid-market churn. Determine the three most likely drivers in the last two quarters. Use the attached cohort export, support themes and current pricing. Do not contact customers or update any system. Return an evidence table, competing explanations, confidence by claim and three recommended next checks.

The decision is clear. The evidence boundary is explicit. The write boundary is explicit. The output can be reviewed.

Reviewing the proposed plan

Before approving, check:

  1. Does each domain answer part of the same decision?
  2. Are important domains missing?
  3. Do two agents duplicate the same work?
  4. Does every agent have a concrete output?
  5. Are data and action permissions explicit?
  6. Is there a clear stop condition?

Do not approve a plan merely because it sounds comprehensive. A larger team increases cost, review load and the chance of contradictory assumptions.

When Inspector asks a question

Inspector is required to ask when the answer would change its next action. Give the smallest answer that resolves the fork. If the question exposes a missing business decision, pause and get the human owner instead of inventing one.

Approving an Inspector plan
Do
  • Approve domains that map directly to the decision
  • Name forbidden data and forbidden actions
  • Ask for claim-to-source links on consequential findings
  • Set a stop condition before external writes or publication
Don't
  • Approve an open-ended plan with no defined output
  • Treat more sub-agents as automatically better
  • Let Inspector infer permissions from access alone
Briefing and plan approval | Mariete Academy