Worked example: Meridian Cloud

This fictional example shows the expected reasoning without implying real people or current company facts.

Brief

Objective: sell a deployment-observability product to Meridian Cloud, a 180-person B2B software company. Scope: engineering and security leadership.

Evidence found

• Maya Chen — CTO — joined 28 months ago.
• Luis Ortega — VP Engineering — joined four months ago.
• Priya Shah — Director of Platform Engineering — joined 19 months ago.
• Ben Laurent — Engineering Manager, Developer Platform — joined 14 months ago.
• No dedicated security executive or Head of Security appeared in the searched leadership and engineering results.

Inference

• CTO → VP Engineering: likely, confidence 2. Same function and adjacent layers.
• VP Engineering → Director of Platform Engineering: likely, confidence 2.
• Director of Platform Engineering → Engineering Manager, Developer Platform: likely, confidence 2.
• Security ownership → CTO: possible, confidence 1. Do not draw this as a solid reporting line.

Structural observations

1. The platform chain has three visible operating layers, so a technical purchase probably needs both Director-level validation and VP-level sponsorship.
2. The VP Engineering is new in role and may be reviewing tooling, but recency alone is not buying intent.
3. No security leader was found. This is a coverage gap, not proof that security is absent or owned by the CTO.

Contact order

1. Priya Shah, likely operating champion: owns the platform problem day to day and can validate technical value.
2. Luis Ortega, likely budget owner: new VP with functional authority over the platform organization.
3. Maya Chen, executive sponsor or approval path: relevant after operating value is established, not the best first cold contact.

The output should include the searched scope, confidence labels, and the explicit sentence: "Reporting lines are inferred from titles and public evidence; actual reporting lines may differ."