Before designing anything, find out how the problem has already been solved. This skill collects three kinds of material: off-the-shelf tools that do the job and what they cost, what the client's competitors visibly do about the same problem, and the patterns that keep repeating in the industry. The output feeds a variant comparison, so it deliberately stops short of a recommendation. Its main job is to keep the difference between "we read this on the vendor's pricing page on 12 March" and "we assume this works like the others" visible on the page, because that difference is what makes a variant comparison honest.
