What was the mission?
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer account. The people and the company are invented; every event in it maps to a real mechanism on ftes.ai, named as it happens.
The company is a founder-led software business considering a first international region. The founder created a strategy mission in the Missions tab for the Market Entry FTE: the question, the region, the constraints, what a useful answer looks like, and a token budget for the mission inside the role's budget. The FTE's remit for strategy work is narrow by design: research from public sources, rank hypotheses with evidence for and against, name what is missing, and draft a plan against the founder's template. It does not recommend entry, set pricing, or contact anyone in the region.
The mission ran as a tracked job overnight, drawing on the wallet within its budget.
What did the mission return?
A first-person report in the Missions tab with ranked hypotheses about the region: the likely customer segments, the competitive landscape, the regulatory conditions, the channel structure, each with the public sources named and dated, the evidence for and against, and the FTE's confidence stated as a reading rather than a number. Inferences are labelled as inferences. A section lists what the FTE could not find from public sources: local pricing norms, the strength of two named competitors' local presence, and whether a regulatory change under discussion has been enacted. The report ends with the questions the founder would need answered by a person in the region.
The morning brief summarised it in five lines and pointed to the full report.
What does the founder do with the hypotheses?
Reads the top three. Challenges the second, about the channel structure, with a reason: a conversation the founder had with a peer suggests the channel the FTE ranked highest is less accessible than the sources imply. The challenge is recorded as a send-back on the hypothesis, and the FTE re-ranks with the founder's note marked as a private source of unknown reliability, which is the honest treatment. The founder accepts the first and third hypotheses as working assumptions, and asks the FTE to draft the go-to-market plan against the template on that basis.
The founder did not ask whether to enter. The FTE would not have answered.
- Read: ranked hypotheses with sources and gaps
- Challenge: one, with a reason, re-ranked with the note labelled
- Decide: working assumptions, plan requested
How does the plan draft go?
The go-to-market plan draft follows the founder's template: segments, positioning within the approved Brand Brain, channels, sequencing, what to test first, what would falsify each assumption, and the budget lines left blank for the founder and the finance lead. It is drafted through the fact gate, so every claim about the region carries its source and every inference is labelled. The founder sends it back once because the sequencing assumes a hire the founder has not decided to make, a rules reason against the constraints the mission set. The revised draft arrives and is approved as a working document, not as a decision.
The market entry go-to-market plan piece in the library describes the template the draft followed.
What stays with the founder?
Everything that is a decision. Whether to enter the region, when, with what budget, with which hire, at what price, and with which partners. The conversation with the person in the region who can answer the questions the report listed. The negotiation, if there is one. The FTE's contribution is that the founder now has a ranked, sourced, gap-labelled picture in a day rather than a consultant's deck in a month, and a plan draft in the founder's own template to argue with. The comparison of a Market Entry FTE with a strategy consultant in the library is honest about what the consultant still brings: relationships, judgement, and local knowledge.
The FTE is a research and drafting function for judgement work. It is not the judgement.
What does the record show at the end of the day?
The audit trail: the mission with its budget and its tokens consumed, the report with every source, the hypothesis challenge with its reason and the re-ranking, the plan draft, the send-back, and the approval as a working document. The Missions tab: the mission closed, its outputs in the Library tab. At the monthly review the founder will read the mission's cost against what a comparable piece of research cost before, and decide whether the next region question is worth a mission. Nothing in the record claims the FTE decided anything, because it did not.
The library's piece on how a Market Entry FTE works describes each mechanism outside the story; the glossary entry on missions describes the three mission modes.