Competitive Brief Builder

Competitive briefs go stale in drawers because they were written to describe a competitor rather than to serve a decision. This skill builds the other kind: a dated, evidence-cited brief organized around what your team must decide — where to differentiate, where parity is table stakes, what to say when buyers compare — with observation kept ruthlessly separate from inference.

When to use this skill

• A pricing, packaging, or roadmap decision needs the competitive landscape mapped first
• Sales keeps losing to the same rival and the counter-arguments are improvised fresh each time
• A new entrant appeared and leadership wants a sober read, not a panic memo
• Quarterly refresh of the standing brief on your two or three most-collided competitors

Workflow

1. Name the decision this brief serves. "Do we match their new tier?", "What do we say in deals against them?", "Where do we differentiate next?" The decision determines which evidence matters; a brief serving no decision serves no one.
2. Collect the public record: product docs and changelogs, pricing pages, release notes, job postings (they reveal where investment is going), review-site commentary, and their own case studies. Capture the URL and access date for every claim you keep.
3. Add the private record where you have it: win/loss notes, deal debriefs, field anecdotes — clearly labeled. Sample sizes are small and sales memory is selective, so these are directional evidence, never measurements.
4. Build the capability comparison against the tasks buyers care about, not against their feature list. For each task: ahead, parity, or behind, with one line of evidence. Resist the checkmark grid that flatters you — a brief the team catches flattering them once is discarded forever.
5. Read their positioning: who they aim at, the claim they lead with, what their pricing structure says about their target buyer, and what they conspicuously do not say. Changes in their messaging over time are strategy made visible; note anything that moved since the last brief.
6. Write the so-what. For the named decision: two or three recommendations with reasoning, the strongest talking points where you win, and honest guidance where you lose — including when to disqualify a deal early rather than fight uphill for it.
7. Stamp it and expire it. Date the brief, list what could not be verified, and set a review date. Competitor facts decay in months, and an undated brief is misinformation with good formatting.

Output format

One page where possible: the decision served; a verdict paragraph; the capability table (task, status, evidence); the positioning read; pricing posture; where-we-win and where-we-lose lists with talk tracks; recommendations; sources with access dates; and the review-by date.

Guardrails

• Every factual claim carries a source and a date; every inference is labeled as inference
• No fear-mongering and no comfort-mongering — both get detected, and either ends the brief's credibility
• The where-we-lose section is mandatory; a brief without it is marketing, not intelligence
• Never include information obtained under NDA or from a customer's confidential materials
• When evidence conflicts, show the conflict rather than picking the convenient half

Worked example: one capability row

Task: "invite an external collaborator without buying a seat." Status: behind. Evidence: their changelog (accessed this week) shipped guest roles two months ago; our equivalent is roadmapped, not built. Talk track meanwhile: guests in our product inherit audit logging that theirs omits — verified against their security docs, dated. One row, one status, one dated fact, one usable line.