💡 Manager Market Day Planning & Product Gap Analysis

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Summary

Give market managers a forward-looking planning view where they can see upcoming market days, which vendors have committed, which product categories are covered vs. missing, and proactively invite vendors to fill gaps. This transforms managers from reactive (waiting to see who shows up) to proactive (building the best possible market for customers).

Market Signal

Marketspread and ManageMyMarket handle vendor applications and booth assignments but don't analyze product-category coverage or help managers identify and fill gaps proactively. Seen Markets added booth mapping and drag-and-drop layout tools but not product-gap analysis. Conference and event management tools (Eventbrite, Whova) increasingly offer content-gap analysis for their organizers — the same pattern applies to market product coverage. The Alaska Farmers Markets Toolkit identifies vendor diversity and product mix as key market health indicators, but no software tool automates this analysis.

User Signal

PRD requirement FR10e explicitly calls out this capability: "Market Manager can plan future market days by selecting upcoming dates from a calendar, seeing committed vendors vs. gaps, and proactively inviting vendors to fill gaps. Supports comparing vendor coverage across multiple upcoming dates." Manager Journey #4 shows Maria receiving 12 texts and 3 calls from vendors — reactive coordination that this feature eliminates. FR10a (manager can browse/search vendors and send invitations) provides the invitation workflow this feature would trigger.

Technical Opportunity

The vendor product catalog (FR12), market roster management (FR10), and vendor invitation flow (FR10a) already provide the data model foundation. The manager dashboard architecture (FR17, AttendanceSummaryBar component) provides the UI pattern for aggregate status views. The Go backend's domain event bus (internal/events/) can trigger gap-analysis recalculations when vendors commit or withdraw from upcoming dates. Cloud Scheduler (already specified for auto-checkout, FR20c) can run weekly gap reports that notify managers of upcoming coverage issues.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	med	Requires a product-category-per-market-day aggregation query, a calendar planning UI, and integration with the vendor invitation flow (FR10a). The data model exists; the planning view and gap algorithm are new.
Impact	high	Directly addresses the #1 manager pain point (reactive coordination). Improves product diversity at markets, which increases customer satisfaction and return visits. Creates a proactive coordination loop that no competitor offers.
Urgency	med	Most valuable once managers are actively using the platform and vendor roster data is populated. Can be designed during MVP and built in the growth phase.

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: Vendors are often uncertain about future attendance until close to market day, making advance planning unreliable. The tool could create false confidence in product coverage that doesn't materialize.

Rebuttal: Even approximate commitment data is better than the current system of texting vendors one by one. The tool shows "committed" vs. "pending" vs. "gap" — it doesn't promise certainty. And the proactive invitation flow means managers START recruitment conversations earlier, giving vendors more time to commit. This shifts the coordination timeline left, which inherently improves reliability. The gap analysis is most valuable 3-7 days before market day, when commitments are more reliable and there's still time to fill gaps.

Suggested Next Step

Design the planning calendar view showing committed/pending/gap status by product category for upcoming market days. Define the gap analysis algorithm: which product categories should a healthy market cover? Create a mock of the manager notification flow for "Your Saturday market is missing a honey vendor — invite one?"

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Generated by the weekly feature ideation workflow on 2026-08-07.