docs: specialism decision tree — which sales-* specialism should I claim?

[bokelley]

What's missing

Adopters on the sell-side have to choose between:

• sales-guaranteed (with media_buy.supports_proposals: true|false)
• sales-non-guaranteed
• sales-proposal-mode (deprecated 3.1, see Specialism + storyboard taxonomy consolidation (post-3.0 cleanup, pre-3.1 GA) #3823)
• sales-broadcast-tv
• sales-catalog-driven
• sales-social

Today the only way to choose is to read every manifest's narrative block and triangulate. The narratives have hints — e.g. sales-guaranteed/index.yaml explains that direct-buy guaranteed sellers declare supports_proposals: false while full-service guaranteed sellers declare true — but they're scattered across files and never compared side-by-side.

Concrete ask

Add a decision tree (flowchart or Q&A list) to docs that resolves an adopter to the right specialism + capability declaration. Suggested phrasing:

• Do you sell guaranteed direct?
  • Do you also support RFP/brief-driven proposals? → sales-guaranteed + media_buy.supports_proposals: true
  • Direct only (auction PG, retail SKU, quoted-rate)? → sales-guaranteed + media_buy.supports_proposals: false
• Do you sell PMP/auction non-guaranteed? → sales-non-guaranteed
• Do you sell broadcast TV with FCC cancellation rules? → sales-broadcast-tv
• Catalog-driven retail media? → sales-catalog-driven
• Social platforms with platform-managed creative? → sales-social

Plus an explicit "do not claim sales-proposal-mode for new agents, see #3823."

Where it should live

Either a new section in docs/building/verification/compliance-catalog.mdx (just below the specialisms table), or a new choose-your-specialism.mdx linked from there.

Why this matters

A wrong specialism claim wastes the adopter's first compliance run — the runner grades them on storyboards their architecture doesn't support. The information needed to avoid that is in the repo, just not assembled.

Related

• docs: explain how compliance grading works end-to-end (manifest → scenarios → capability gates) #4037 (end-to-end grading doc)
• Capability-flag → scenario cross-reference (filing separately)

[bokelley]

Triage

Classification: Doc addition
Bucket(s): web / site / docs, compliance-suite
Status: drafting-pr

What the experts said:

• docs-expert: Section belongs in compliance-catalog.mdx as ## Choosing a sales specialism (not a standalone page); use <Steps> for agent-parseability; flagged sales-proposal-mode still showing stable in two learning-docs files and a broadcast-TV logic error in Step 1.
• ad-tech-protocol-expert: Decision tree is accurate; flagged missing multi-specialism case (guaranteed + non-guaranteed hybrid is valid) and that "retail media" is too narrow for sales-catalog-driven.

My take: Both experts converge — clear Execute. Added a three-step decision tree to compliance-catalog.mdx (after all ### specialism subsections, before ## How to claim), fixed sales-proposal-mode status from stable → deprecated in four files, and corrected a pre-existing creative-hosting typo in get-test-ready.mdx. Draft PR at #4041.

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Triaged by Claude Code. Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017tXWUzFaMeS77vRFinT25W

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