Agent · Analyst 📊

E11 Analyst (skill: e11-agent-analyst) — the business analyst. Research, product briefs, PRFAQ challenges, and brownfield documentation. Alloy-first for anything technical: the platform is consulted before the web.

What it produces

• Product briefs — {planning_artifacts}/briefs/brief-<project>-<date>/brief.md (via e11-product-brief, Create/Update/Validate intents).
• Research documents — {planning_artifacts}/research/{market,domain,technical}-<slug>-research-<date>.md.
• PRFAQ — {planning_artifacts}/prfaq-<project>.md (working-backwards press release + FAQs).
• Project documentation / context — via e11-document-project and e11-generate-project-context.

When to use it

• Pre-PRD discovery: you have an idea (or just a problem) and need it shaped before PM takes over.
• Brownfield: you inherited a codebase and need docs or a lean project-context.md before anything else.
• A technical feasibility question that should be answered from the platform first.

How to invoke

Invoke e11-agent-analyst; it greets and presents its menu:

Code	Dispatches to	Purpose
[MR]	e11-market-research	Market, competition, customer needs
[DR]	e11-domain-research	Industry deep dive, terminology
[TR]	e11-technical-research	Feasibility + options — alloy-first, web for the rest
[CB]	e11-product-brief	Create / Update / Validate a brief
[PF]	e11-prfaq	Working-backwards PRFAQ challenge
[DP]	e11-document-project	Brownfield analysis → project docs
[GPC]	e11-generate-project-context	Lean LLM-optimized project-context.md
[QK]	e11-knowledge	Pull an alloy doc directly

Every menu skill can also be invoked directly (skill:e11-product-brief, …) — the agent adds the persona and the alloy-first discipline around them.

The alloy-first research rule

The Analyst's activation_steps_prepend bakes in the source boundary: technical research queries skill:e11-knowledge (foundation:*, pattern:, infra:, sdk:) before any web search and cites alloy://<path>; market and domain research are web territory. Research outputs keep "From alloy" and "From the web" sections separate so you can see which claims are platform-backed.

Example session

You: e11-agent-analyst

Analyst: 📊 E11 Analyst here. What are we investigating?
         [menu: MR / DR / TR / CB / PF / DP / GPC / QK]

You: TR — can we build usage-based billing on the platform?

Analyst: Alloy pass first.
         skill:e11-knowledge list:sdks → checking billing coverage
         skill:e11-knowledge pattern:multi-tenancy → tenant scoping rules
         From alloy: metering hooks are covered (alloy://... cites) ...
         Residual for the web: third-party payment rails comparison.
         [web pass, then writes research/technical-usage-billing-research-2026-07-20.md]

Gotchas

• Research skills need web access (market/domain especially — they abort without it). Technical research still runs its alloy pass regardless.
• The brief skill pushes back. e11-product-brief reads stakes early (passion project vs public launch) and interrogates thin answers on the coaching path. If you just want a draft to react to, ask for the fast path — it batches questions and tags [ASSUMPTION]s.
• PRFAQ is a stress test, not a formality. If you can't articulate the customer or the problem, it redirects you to e11-discovery or e11-forge-idea first.

Customizing

Persona (role, identity, communication_style, principles), menu, activation steps, and persistent facts live in the agent's customize.toml and can be overridden sparsely in .foundry/custom/e11-agent-analyst.toml. The alloy-first research rule ships as a default activation_steps_prepend entry. See Customization.

Source

src/foundry/workflows/1-analysis/e11-agent-analyst/SKILL.md

See also: Phase 1 — Analysis · PRFAQ · Knowledge layer.