# Competitive analysis
Use this method to understand the alternatives a buyer or organization can choose, the evidence for each alternative's position, and the implications for a specific decision. It produces a decision memo, not a public claim, prospecting list, or vendor recommendation.
Frame the decision
Start with the decision, product or service, buyer, geography, time horizon, and supplied context. Separate competitors from adjacent products, internal workarounds, and the status quo. Ask only for a missing fact that would change the comparison or standard of proof.
Method
- State the decision and the category boundary.
- Define comparison dimensions before researching: buyer, job to be done, target segment, delivery model, commercial model, proof, distribution, and constraints.
- Build a broad candidate set from primary sources first: official product pages, documentation, pricing, filings, customer evidence, and credible independent coverage. Label discovery-only sources as such.
- Group alternatives by the buyer problem they solve, rather than treating every similar feature as direct competition.
- Compare material alternatives against the same dimensions. Capture a URL, publication or retrieval date, and confidence for every non-trivial claim.
- Identify market structure: concentration, switching barriers, missing capabilities, substitute behavior, and signs that the category boundary is changing.
- Form a differentiation hypothesis as a testable statement of who would choose the focal option, for what reason, over which alternative. Do not present a positioning hypothesis as demonstrated advantage.
- End with a recommendation, supporting evidence, what could change it, and the smallest next validation action.
Output
```markdown # [Category] competitive analysis ## Decision and scope ## Category and alternatives ## Evidence and method ## Comparison ## Market structure ## Differentiation hypotheses ## Risks, unknowns, and next validation ## Sources ```
Quality rules
- Do not infer capability, price, adoption, or market share from a search snippet or vendor claim alone.
- Preserve facts, assumptions, calculations, and unknowns as separate things.
- Give conflicting evidence its own note rather than silently selecting the convenient source.
- Cite non-trivial external claims inline and list every source with the claim it supports.
- Do not recommend outreach, publication, or a system write; return a proposed handoff when a host workflow owns that action.