Trend Analysis

---
name: trend-analysis
description: Analyze market trends by separating durable structural change from short-lived attention using time-series evidence, adoption signals, drivers, constraints, counter-signals, and scenario implications.
---
# Trend Analysis

Use when product or strategy decisions depend on whether a market change is likely to persist, accelerate, plateau, or reverse.

## Procedure
1. Define the trend, market boundary, timeframe, customer segment, and decision it could affect.
2. Gather evidence across time rather than comparing two convenient snapshots; use adoption, spend, search, production, regulation, funding, usage, or other relevant signals.
3. Identify underlying drivers such as cost curves, technology capability, regulation, demographics, distribution, behavior, infrastructure, or business incentives.
4. Identify constraints and counter-signals that could limit or reverse the trend.
5. Separate attention or media volume from actual adoption, revenue, behavior, or capacity where possible.
6. Segment the trend by customer type, geography, use case, or maturity because aggregate movement can hide different trajectories.
7. Build plausible continuation, acceleration, and slowdown scenarios around the drivers that are genuinely uncertain.
8. Translate the evidence into decision implications and trigger conditions for revisiting the analysis.

## Decision rules
- A trend requires direction over time, not one popular event.
- Adoption evidence is usually stronger than attention metrics for product decisions.
- Explain the drivers that would make the trend persist.
- Counter-evidence should be actively sought, not appended as a disclaimer at the end.

## Quality gate
The analysis is ready when the trend is evidenced across an appropriate time horizon, drivers and constraints are explicit, attention is separated from adoption, segment differences and counter-signals are visible, and scenarios identify what would change the strategic implication.