Define External Forma Product Value Validation

Goal

Define a small comparative pilot that can raise or lower confidence in Forma's value versus well-designed Markdown, editor features, lightweight scripts, and generic coding Agents.

Observed Baseline

Internal dogfooding and starter-kit pressure validation prove technical mechanics and Agent discoverability. They do not measure external setup cost, recurring use, time saved, errors prevented, or willingness to keep Forma in a real workflow.

Initial Case Corpus

The first protocol uses two user-authorized published case narratives from the choral-io/knowledge-research repository as qualitative inputs, not as pre-counted pilot results:

• From knowledge-workflow to Forma identifies the cost of carrying software-engineering knowledge mechanics into content, sales, professional-service, and operations domains.
• From documents to knowledge assets describes a professional-services trial in which structured records, evidence, review boundaries, and recurring maintenance improve reuse without delegating professional judgment to an Agent.

The pilot must collect the same evidence in a comparable shape before treating either narrative as support for a product-value claim.

In Scope

• Define participant and repository criteria for three to five external teams or maintainers.
• Establish a disciplined Markdown baseline before introducing Forma.
• Measure setup/support time, schema/reference failures caught, Agent rework, task completion time, feature use, and continued weekly use.
• Separate source portability value from runtime/projection value.
• Define privacy, consent, evidence retention, success thresholds, and stop criteria.
• Repeat the pilot after guided modeling and safe-write milestones rather than waiting for every roadmap item.

Out Of Scope

• Claiming market fit from release downloads or internal dogfooding.
• Broad market research, pricing, or a growth campaign.
• Collecting product telemetry without explicit design and consent.
• Selecting only repositories already optimized for Forma.

Acceptance Criteria

• The comparison protocol, cohort criteria, measures, and stop conditions are explicit.
• Baseline and Forma-assisted workflows use the same representative jobs.
• Qualitative findings are separated from measured outcomes.
• A future experiment and metric record can capture results without changing the protocol.
• Results can recommend continue, narrow, reposition, or stop for each roadmap claim.

Sequencing

Define the baseline alongside guided modeling. Run the first meaningful external comparison after guided modeling and import/normalization provide a complete adoption path.