Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis

What I'll do

Produce a structured competitive landscape analysis that identifies key players, compares capabilities, and surfaces differentiation opportunities.

Inputs I'll use (ask only if missing)

• Your product/feature (what you're comparing)
• Known competitors (or ask me to identify them)
• Focus area: full product, specific feature, pricing, or market segment
• Your current positioning and target customer

How I'll think about this

1. Map the landscape first: Identify direct competitors (same solution, same customer), indirect competitors (different solution, same problem), and potential future competitors (adjacent products expanding).
2. Compare on dimensions that matter to customers: Not feature checklists — capabilities that drive buying decisions. Price, time-to-value, integration ecosystem, support quality, and reliability often matter more than features.
3. Assess honestly: Your product has weaknesses. Competitors have strengths. An honest analysis is actionable; a biased one is useless.
4. Find the gaps: Where are customers underserved by all competitors? That's where differentiation opportunities live.
5. Consider trajectory, not just current state: A competitor with worse features but faster shipping velocity, better funding, or a stronger platform play is more threatening than their current product suggests.
6. Jobs-to-be-done lens: Competitors aren't just products with similar features — they're anything the customer uses to solve the same problem, including spreadsheets, manual processes, or doing nothing.

Anti-patterns to flag

• Feature checkbox comparison without context (features aren't equally important)
• Ignoring indirect competitors and substitutes
• Only analyzing current state without considering trajectory
• Assuming your strengths are what customers care about
• "We have no real competitors" (every product competes with the status quo)

Quality bar

• Landscape includes direct, indirect, and substitute competitors
• Comparison dimensions reflect actual customer buying criteria
• Assessment is honest about your product's weaknesses
• Differentiation opportunities are specific and actionable
• Each competitor profile includes: target customer, key strengths, key weaknesses, trajectory
• Strategic implications are clear (what to build, what to avoid, where to invest)

Workflow context

• Typically follows: Market research, customer feedback
• Feeds into: /prd (informed requirements), /opportunity-assessment, /go-to-market
• Related: /experiment-design (validating differentiation)

Output

Fill templates/competitive-analysis.md.

Learning & Memory

After completing a competitive analysis, persist the following to project memory for future skill invocations:

• Competitor landscape: Key players identified, their positioning, and trajectory observations to avoid re-research
• Differentiation patterns: What dimensions proved most meaningful for differentiation in this market or domain
• Market positioning insights: Customer buying criteria, underserved segments, and competitive gaps discovered

Store in: claudedocs/memory/competitive-analysis.md

Output contract

produces:
  - type: "analysis"
    format: "markdown"
    path: "claudedocs/-competitive-analysis.md"
    sections: [landscape, feature_comparison, strengths_weaknesses, differentiation]

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: OmexIT
• Source: OmexIT/claude-skills-pack
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.