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Project Status

Last updated: 2026-05-18.

Read these first, in order

  1. docs/brief/concept-narrative.md — current articulation of the product concept and the layered-model design thesis.
  2. docs/discovery/customer-zero-profile.md — GMI as the design partner / first test surface.
  3. docs/v0/scope.md — v0 build scope.
  4. This document.
  5. The rest of docs/ as needed.

Who works on this product

  • Tyler Georgiadis — builder, repo owner. Sole engineer at present.
  • Greg Sher — product co-lead, sales / industry. Co-founder of GMI. Industry expertise and connections are a primary design input and the basis for the eventual sales motion.

This repo is the shared product design brain for both contributors.

Current stage

v0 build planning complete; ready for platform-repo handoff. v0 scope memo reviewed by Greg (no industry-side blind spots flagged) and locked. Three synthetic supplier profiles and two fictional retailer profiles are in place as v0 test surfaces, sitting under docs/v0/ alongside the scope memo. APIC competitive posture verified by attending the supplier-onboarding meeting. Implementation work moves to the platform repo from here; this repo continues to hold product strategy, discovery, and v0-scope artifacts.

What has been decided

  • Layered canonical + transformation model is the load-bearing design thesis. Shared canonical layer (categories, facets, primary fields) + per-retailer transformation layer (configurable mappings producing retailer-shaped outputs). See docs/decisions/0001-layered-canonical-model.md.
  • Sweetwater is the design reference — best-in-class US music retailer with ~300+ standardised facets per category. Their public taxonomy/facet structure anchors v0 design.
  • Target market: APIC/MusiPOS users + smaller retailers without their own solution. Not the largest national chains with mature in-house data ops.
  • Cross-retailer supplier overlap (H2) is confirmed by industry knowledge: AU brands have single exclusive distributors, so retailers stocking the same brand share the same supplier. Shared normalised layer is the structurally correct shape.
  • Generalisability beyond instruments is confirmed. The design isn't instrument-specific.
  • Greg Sher is product co-lead and the primary sales / industry driver. GMI is customer zero — co-designer, sanity-checker, and likely reference customer (not "the wedge target").
  • APIC is not a meaningful competitor at present. See docs/landscape/apic.md.
  • Design quality is a v0 priority, not a v1 polish concern. UX is enforced from the first commit — visual quality, interaction polish, and a shared design system across admin and retailer surfaces. See "Design quality bar" in docs/v0/scope.md.

What's open

  • H3 supplier participation in a centralised platform (individual-retailer behaviour is positive; platform-level still unproven). APIC supplier meeting attended week of 2026-05-12; it produced competitive verification but not H3-shaped supplier-behaviour intel — see docs/landscape/apic.md. Next signal will come from direct supplier conversations rather than APIC observation.
  • H4 pricing / commercial model. Deferred until v0 demonstrates value.
  • H5 transformation layer absorbs retailer divergence cleanly — this is the design hypothesis v0 proves; v0 build is the test.
  • Multi-retailer interview sprint (docs/discovery/customer-discovery-plan.md) — not yet scheduled; lower priority now given H1/H2 confirmed.

What's stale or partial in this repo

  • docs/discovery/customer-discovery-plan.md — was authored when H1/H2 were open; some assumption thresholds have been overtaken. Still useful as a framework for the eventual multi-retailer sprint.
  • docs/discovery/open-questions.md — partially answered; some questions superseded.
  • docs/discovery/assumptions-and-hypotheses.md — original assumption log, mostly superseded by the concept narrative and the risk-ranked version in the customer discovery plan.
  • docs/brief/product-brief.md — original inception brief; the MVP it describes is overtaken by the v0 scope memo. docs/brief/concept-narrative.md is the current articulation.

Recently completed (pre-handoff)

  • v0 scope memo at docs/v0/scope.md — reviewed by Greg, no industry-side blind spots raised, locked as the handoff brief.
  • Structured workflow walkthrough call with Greg — held. Output folded into docs/discovery/gmi-walkthrough-notes.md rather than a separate map doc.
  • APIC supplier-onboarding meeting (week of 2026-05-12) — attended. Findings folded into docs/landscape/apic.md. Reinforced "not a meaningful competitor" verdict; did not produce H3-shaped supplier-behaviour intel.
  • Synthetic supplier profile set — three deliberately-varied synthetic suppliers (A/B/C) drafted by 2026-05-18; all live under docs/v0/. The C profile forced two new v0 commitments captured in docs/v0/scope.md under Per-supplier mapping config: v0 capabilities: (a) a missing-column warning at ingest (not full schema-drift detection — v0 expects operator awareness when a supplier's file shape changes; the platform flags missing saved-mapping columns and otherwise leaves drift to operator re-mapping); (b) per-supplier (or per-file-variant) missing-product handling with two v0 modes — ignore-missing-rows, snapshot-diff. Operator-confirm-per-push and grace-period are both deferred post-v0; suppliers like C with mixed snapshot/delta pushes and no status column default to snapshot-diff with known misclassification — v0 resolution is to escalate to the supplier rather than build per-push operator gating.
  • Retailer profiles for the v0 transformation targets — JBM and CMS at docs/v0/joe-bloggs-music-profile.md and docs/v0/capital-music-sound-profile.md; GMI partner profile at docs/discovery/customer-zero-profile.md.

Active next steps

  1. Platform repo handoff — implementation conversation moves there with docs/v0/scope.md as the brief. This is the next concrete action; the rest of this list is parallel/optional.
  2. Curation workstream — define the v0 facet set per category, draw canonical values from supplier data + Sweetwater reference (research/inputs/sweetwater-category-reference-2026-05-13.xlsx). Content work, parallel to software. Not a handoff blocker; required for credible demo.
  3. Direct supplier conversations — to produce H3 signal that the APIC meeting did not. Lower urgency than handoff but the open H3 path.

Repo map

  • CLAUDE.md — repo behaviour rules and stage awareness.
  • STATUS.md — this file.
  • docs/brief/
  • product-brief.md — original inception brief (banner).
  • concept-narrative.md — current concept articulation (load-bearing).
  • docs/decisions/
  • 0001-layered-canonical-model.md — the load-bearing design thesis.
  • docs/v0/
  • scope.md — v0 build scope memo (load-bearing for platform-repo handoff).
  • supplier-a-profile.md — synthetic rich-data supplier profile (v0 ingestion test surface).
  • supplier-b-profile.md — synthetic medium supplier profile, print music distributor archetype (v0 ingestion test surface; covers Print Music v0-priority category).
  • supplier-c-profile.md — synthetic degraded supplier profile, drum-and-percussion wholesaler archetype (v0 ingestion test surface; covers Drums v0-priority category; exercises cross-supplier identity resolution and forces schema-drift + deletion-detection v0 commitments).
  • joe-bloggs-music-profile.md — fictional small-retailer profile (transformation-layer test surface).
  • capital-music-sound-profile.md — Cin7-shape retailer profile (output-schema stress case).
  • docs/discovery/
  • customer-zero-profile.md — GMI as the design partner. Also referenced as one of the v0 retailer transformation targets; the GMI partner relationship lives here, the v0 fixture role is referenced from docs/v0/scope.md.
  • gmi-walkthrough-notes.md — captured workflow knowledge from Greg's accounts.
  • customer-discovery-plan.md — multi-retailer plan (lower priority now).
  • assumptions-and-hypotheses.md — original assumption log (banner).
  • open-questions.md — refreshed open questions.
  • docs/landscape/
  • apic.md — competitive landscape: APIC.
  • apic-database-reference.md — technical reference for APIC's database (carried over).
  • docs/templates/
  • decision-memo-template.md
  • fictional-retailer-profile-template.md
  • supplier-source-profile-template.md
  • docs/api/, docs/roadmap/, docs/taxonomy/ — empty, intentionally.
  • research/inputs/ — partner-shared raw data, local-only (see research/inputs/README.md).
  • .claude/rules/ — repo rule files referenced by CLAUDE.md.