Practice — Case Study: Design a Deep Research Agent (10 questions)

A deep research agent is asked "should we expand into the European market?" and the planning step produces this decomposition:

1. What is our current market share in comparable markets?

2. What regulatory hurdles exist for our product category in the EU?

3. Given the answer to (1), which specific countries should we target first?

4. What do European customers in this segment say they need that current offerings don't provide?

5. Identify the problem with this decomposition as a plan for parallel sub-agent execution, and explain precisely why it's a problem.

6. Propose a fix, and say whether your fix changes the number of sub-agents, the number of planning rounds, or both.

7. Would you rather catch this failure at plan-review time or after all four sub-agents have already run? Justify your answer with the cost/latency stakes involved.