The account file

The customer exists now. This is where the manual’s signature begins: every lesson from here runs on two tracks — what you are doing for Contoso, and what your harness is doing for you.

THE ENGAGEMENT

The deal lands on your desk as a name and a clock. Contoso Financial Group is pursuing an “Institutional Client Platform Modernization,” and the number that governs everything is the incumbent’s renewal — eleven months out. Priya Raman sponsors it; Tom Okafor owns the budget; Sarah Kim decides whether Security will allow any of it. You have a compete you respect: a fourteen-year-old, heavily customized legacy CRM that the client’s people know in their hands. Your job over the rest of this manual is to earn the replacement.

The full dossier lives in the brief. What matters this lesson is that the deal context has to go somewhere, and where it goes is a decision with rules.

THE HARNESS

You instantiate the engagement repo from the Part I template — the numbered folders, the instruction stack, the agents, the MCP config. Then you practice intake discipline, which is mostly about what you refuse to put in the repo.

Public research, your own notes, and fiction-safe summaries may live here. The customer’s data of record may not. The opportunity brief that arrives from the CRM becomes a summary in 00-intake/ — the shape of the deal, not an export of the customer’s system. The constitution already says this; intake is where you feel why.

The MSX pattern

Sellers at Microsoft work in MSX, the internal seller experience. It is useful here as a pattern, and it is a careful example of stating only what is public. What is documented: MSX is Microsoft’s internal seller CRM, built on Dynamics 365^⊙ ; MSX Copilot shipped in July 2023^⊙ ; MSX Insights is the business-intelligence layer on Fabric^⊙ ; and a Daily Recommender surfaces next-best actions.^⊙ What is not public is everything else — the internal architecture, the entity model, the module names.^⊙

So when this manual shows how a seller-side opportunity brief becomes the repo’s 00-intake/ folder, that reconstruction is labeled for what it is:

The pattern — a system of record you summarize from, a repo you build in — is real and transferable. The internal specifics are not ours to invent.

In the field

If you did not build the Part I files by hand, download the starter from the pack and open it in VS Code first.

Run your /new-engagement command against a scratch folder. When it asks for the customer, the opportunity, and the compete, answer with a fiction-safe summary — never a paste from a real CRM. Confirm that 00-intake/ ends up with a README that draws the line between what may and may not live in the repo.