IP Department (SDC) — Job Description

Approved by the CEO 2026-09-21. Created by SMART-DEBT-Strategies-Library on the CEO’s instruction (“Strategy library is fundamentally intellectual property, IP. IP is important enough to be a top level department folder for each business.”). The department operates at A1 — SVP-IP drafts, the CEO approves.

Acronyms are defined in at the end.

Mission: Own, version, and protect the intellectual property that is $MART DEBT Coach’s actual product — the strategies themselves, the software that models them, and the names they are known by.

Why this department exists

Strategy and IP are different jobs that were sharing a folder:

• SDC/Strategy/ — business-level strategic planning: positioning, ICP, roadmap, how the business grows.
• SDC/IP/ — the durable assets the business sells or gives away: the Strategies Library, the apps that compute it, the coined names.

A strategy is not a plan for growing the business; it is the product. Holding it in Strategy/ conflated the two, which is why it moved here.

Scope — owned

1. The $MART DEBT Strategies Library — SDC/IP/Strategies/. Every strategy as a versioned file with a fixed schema, sorted first by risk. SCHEMA is the schema SSOT; Strategies Library is the index. Developed as the ongoing project Strategies-Library (since 2026-09-23).
   • The name is plural on purpose — CEO decision, 2026-09-23. Always “$MART DEBT Strategies Library”, never “Strategy Library”. The plural carries one of the library’s core messages: borrowing to invest is not a strategy but dozens of distinct ones, and consumer debt has dozens more. A singular name repeats the misconception the library exists to correct.
2. The schema and its risk axis — the risk-level scale, what each level permits, and what a strategy must carry to be publishable.
3. Coined names. A named concept is attributable to the person who named it. Every strategy’s name is treated as an asset: short, deliberate, and stable once published. Most $MART DEBT strategies have no agreed name anywhere — giving each one is a large part of why this library exists.
4. Software IP — SDC/IP/Apps/: the design notes and specifications for sd-math, sd-app, asset-history and the packages they depend on. (The code lives in the monorepo and is built by IT; what lives here is the IP account of what it is and why.)
5. Strategy identifiers — the code numbering scheme, assigned once and never reused.

Scope — NOT owned

• Business positioning, ICP, roadmap → SDC/Strategy/
• Offering packaging, pricing, advisor-facing kits → SDC/Offerings/ (including SDC/Offerings/Advisors/Strategies/, the advisor-practice strategies, which are an offering rather than client IP)
• Marketing and distribution → SDC/Mktg/
• Software build and deployment → SDC/IT/ (Core IT executes)
• Compliance review of anything touching leverage → SDC/Risks/, which gates release

The gate this department inherits — carried forward deliberately

SDC/Strategy/JOB_DESCRIPTION.md routes any change to how leverage strategies are presented through Risks (Risk-Challenger) first. The Strategies Library moved out of that department on 2026-09-21; the gate moved with it and is restated here so it is not lost in the move.

That gate binds:

• Any change to the risk-level scale or to which level a strategy sits at.
• Any change to the intervention a level permits (the Rule 1 mapping in SCHEMA).
• Any new or changed strategy at risk-level >= 2 — i.e. one that increases net market exposure. (This replaced a leverage: yes flag dropped on 2026-09-21.)

⚠ The risk-level >= 2 filter has a known gap, and it is no longer hypothetical. Updated 2026-09-22.

This section previously said the filter and the old leverage: yes flag were “equivalent under the schema’s assignment rule”, with a residual gap that would only open for a strategy at negative or zero risk. Both statements are now wrong, and they were wrong in the direction that matters — they described the gap one band narrower than the one that actually exists, so a reader checking level-1 records against this charter would conclude there was nothing to find.

SCHEMA §2.3’s named test ran during the Market Drop Wins fold-in and came back positive at level 1:

• rrsp-gross-up-loan (IL-6) borrows money and puts it in the market, and sits at level 1. Level 2’s own third clause — outcome depends on returns exceeding an after-tax borrowing cost over a long horizon — is false when the loan is extinguished within weeks by the refund the contribution itself creates.
• non-callable-first (LS-7) escapes by a second route: it is entirely about leverage but takes no exposure of its own, so no clause of level 2 applies.

Until Risks and the CEO settle a second criterion, both records are routed to Risks by hand and each carries the flag in its own body. The drafted proposal — risk-level >= 2 OR the strategy’s mechanism involves borrowing — is recorded in SCHEMA §2.3 and queued in SDC/IP/Projects/Strategies-Library/ROADMAP.md → Waiting on Talbot. This department has not changed the gate; changing it is Risks’ call, and recording the finding is all A1 permits.

Inputs (consulted)

• Core/CONSTITUTION.md — operating principles
• SDC/Strategy/Strategic-Plan.md — Phase 1b is the library; Rule 1 is the risk-tiering rule the schema implements
• SDC/Risks/JOB_DESCRIPTION.md, SDC/Risks/Canada-Leverage-Compliance.md — the constraints that now key on risk-level >= 2
• Core/Processes/Behavioural-Solutions.md — read through the risk-tiering constraint, not applied wholesale

Outputs (produced)

• SDC/IP/Strategies/ — the Strategies Library: SCHEMA, the generated index, one file per strategy. A conformant OKF bundle (SCHEMA §9).
• The strategy code register (uniqueness enforced by the library validator)
• SDC/IP/Apps/ — software IP notes

Decisions

• Alone (A1 draft → CEO approves): schema field additions, strategy drafting, code assignment, rank ordering, index structure.
• Escalate to CEO: the risk-level scale itself, a strategy’s level, anything changing what the product is permitted to do at a level, and publishing a strategy externally.
• Deferred CEO decisions are queued in SDC/IP/Projects/Strategies-Library/ROADMAP.md → Waiting on Talbot rather than blocking work.
• Escalate to Risks first, then CEO: everything named in The gate this department inherits above.

Hand off to

• → Risks — compliance signoff before any strategy ships
• → IT — app-url routes and any software the library needs
• → Mktg — strategies cleared for use in campaigns
• → Offerings — advisor-practice strategies, which are an offering, not client IP

Staff

• SVP-IP — Staff/SVP-IP.md. A1 — drafts, CEO approves. Drafted 2026-09-21.

Notes

• A1 — autonomy level 1: the agent drafts, the CEO approves. Levels run A0 (nothing without approval) to A4 (fully autonomous).
• ICP — Ideal Client Profile.
• IP — Intellectual Property.
• Risk-Challenger — the adversarial review role inside SDC/Risks/.
• Rule 1 — Strategic-Plan.md’s first hard rule: intervention strength is a function of risk.
• SSOT — Single Source of Truth. One home, zero duplicates.

UPGRADES (deferred)

Moved on 2026-09-23 to Strategies-Library UPGRADES. Both items there are about the library.