AI Competitive Analysis: 7 Prompts and a Free Template for PMs

Competitor profiles take an afternoon to build and then they rot. You research a competitor across their website, G2, LinkedIn, and a sales rep's memory, drop the result into a Google Doc, and share it in Slack. Three months later the pricing has changed, a feature shipped, and nobody updates the doc because rebuilding it costs another afternoon. The intelligence goes stale, and the next person starts from scratch.

The fix isn't working harder. It's working in three stages. Prompts get you a sharp profile in minutes. A template makes every profile look the same so you can compare them. And a skill turns the whole thing into an always-on capability that reads your product context and refreshes in 15 minutes.

This article gives you all three. Start with the 7 prompts below, paste the template, and graduate to the skill when you're tired of doing it by hand.

Manual vs. One-Shot Prompt vs. Skill

There are three ways to produce a competitor profile. They differ less in the first draft than in what happens over time.

The prompts below get you from the first row to the second. The skill gets you to the third. Both produce real output today. The difference is whether the profile survives past this quarter.

The 7 Prompts

Each prompt has one rule baked in: be opinionated. A list of features both products share tells you nothing. You need a verdict. "They win on enterprise permissions, you win on time-to-value for teams under 20." Make Claude take a side, then pressure-test it.

Every prompt gets sharper when Claude already knows your product. If you're running Claude Code with context files, drop the "my product" setup lines — your product.md and competitors.md already carry that context.

1. Full Competitor Profile

Build a competitor profile for [competitor name].

My product: [brief description]
My target user: [persona]
What I already know about them: [paste any notes, or "starting from scratch"]

Produce a structured profile covering:
- What they do and who they serve
- Core positioning and how they frame themselves vs. alternatives
- Pricing model and tier structure
- Feature set, mapped to the categories my product competes in
- Strengths (what they're genuinely good at)
- Weaknesses (gaps, complaints, where they're thin)
- Recent moves (funding, launches, partnerships, hiring signals)

Be opinionated. End with one line: "They win on [X], we win on [Y]."
Don't give me a neutral feature matrix. Take a side and defend it.

2. Positioning & Differentiation Map

Map how [competitor name] positions against my product.

My positioning: [one-sentence value prop]
Their positioning: [paste their homepage headline + subhead]
My target segment: [persona and company size]

Analyze across:
- Core value proposition (what each of us leads with)
- Who each product is really built for
- The promise each makes that the other can't credibly make
- Where our positioning overlaps and confuses buyers

Be opinionated. Tell me where they out-position us and where we out-position
them — not "both serve product teams." I need "they own the enterprise
buyer's trust; we own the solo PM who wants value in week one."

3. Feature Gap Analysis

Run a feature gap analysis between my product and [competitor name].

My key features: [list]
Their key features: [paste from their site, changelog, or docs]
The jobs my target user is trying to get done: [list 3-5]

For each job-to-be-done, tell me:
- Who solves it better and why
- Where they have a feature we lack that actually matters
- Where we have a feature they lack that actually matters
- Which gaps are real buying criteria vs. checkbox features

Be opinionated. Rank the gaps by how often they decide a deal, not by
count. A neutral "they have X, we don't" list is useless. Tell me which
gaps to close this quarter and which to ignore.

4. Pricing & Packaging Teardown

Tear down [competitor name]'s pricing and packaging against mine.

Their pricing: [paste tiers, prices, what's gated at each level]
My pricing: [paste mine]
My target buyer: [persona and budget reality]

Analyze:
- How their tier structure steers buyers (what's the "default" tier?)
- What they gate behind higher tiers and why
- Where their entry price beats or loses to ours, and for whom
- The packaging move they're making that we're not

Be opinionated. Tell me where their pricing wins the deal and where it
backfires. "Their $29 tier undercuts our $49 tier for solo users" beats
"they have three pricing tiers."

5. Win/Loss Pattern Analysis

Analyze competitive win/loss patterns from this deal data.

Deal outcomes (won/lost, competitor involved, stated reason):
[paste deal notes, CRM export, or sales call summaries]

My product: [brief description]

Identify:
- Which competitor shows up most in losses, and the pattern behind it
- The specific feature, price point, or capability that tips decisions
- Where we lose on product vs. lose on price vs. lose on positioning
- The stated reason vs. the likely real reason for each loss pattern

Be opinionated. Give me the one competitive pattern costing us the most
deals and what to do about it. Don't hedge with "more data would help."
Tell me what the data already says.

6. Sales Battlecard

Write a one-page competitive battlecard for sales against [competitor name].

My product: [brief description]
Their product: [brief description]
Common objection reps hear: [paste if you have one]

Structure it as:
- One-line "how we win" against this competitor
- 3 talking points that play to our strengths
- 3 traps to avoid (where they'll try to pull the conversation)
- Objection handlers for the 3 most common "but they have X" pushbacks
- A landmine question the rep can plant that exposes their weakness

Be opinionated and specific. Reps need "say this, not that." A neutral
comparison doesn't help in a live call. Give them ammunition.

7. Competitive Landscape Map

Map the competitive landscape for my market.

My product: [brief description]
My target segment: [persona]
Competitors I track: [list direct and indirect competitors]

Produce a landscape map that:
- Plots competitors across two axes that actually matter to buyers
  (e.g. price tier vs. feature depth, or SMB vs. enterprise focus)
- Identifies where competitors cluster and where there's whitespace
- Shows where my product sits and the gap I'm best positioned to own
- Flags the market shift that's about to open or close a position

Be opinionated. Don't just describe the field — tell me the one whitespace
worth chasing and the one crowded corner to avoid.

The Competitor Profile Template

Copy this template into your doc, fill it for one competitor, and reuse it for every other. Same dimensions every time is what makes profiles comparable. When two profiles share a structure, you can read them side by side and actually decide something.

# Competitor Profile: [Competitor Name]

_Last updated: [YYYY-MM-DD] · Owner: [PM name]_

## Snapshot
- **What they do:** [one sentence]
- **Who they serve:** [target segment and company size]
- **Stage / size:** [funding, headcount, or maturity signal]
- **Threat level:** [High / Medium / Low] — [one line on why]

## Positioning
- **Their headline promise:** [paste their core claim]
- **How they frame the category:** [their narrative]
- **Who they're really built for:** [the buyer they win]

## Pricing & Packaging
- **Model:** [free / freemium / paid / usage-based]
- **Tiers:** [list with prices and what's gated]
- **The "default" tier most buyers land on:** [which one and why]
- **Where their price beats / loses to ours:** [and for whom]

## Features
| Job-to-be-done | Them | Us | Who wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| [job 1] | [their approach] | [our approach] | [verdict] |
| [job 2] | [their approach] | [our approach] | [verdict] |
| [job 3] | [their approach] | [our approach] | [verdict] |

## Strengths (where they genuinely win)
- [strength 1]
- [strength 2]

## Weaknesses (gaps, complaints, thin spots)
- [weakness 1]
- [weakness 2]

## Recent Moves
- [funding / launch / partnership / hiring signal + date]

## The Verdict
- **They win on:** [X]
- **We win on:** [Y]
- **How we beat them in a deal:** [one line for sales]
- **What we'd watch:** [the move that would change this profile]

The template is the format. The prompts above fill it. The skill keeps it current.

From Prompts to a Living Profile

The prompts produce a great profile. The problem is the same one that kills every manual profile: nobody re-runs them. A competitor changes pricing, ships a feature, raises a round, and your profile quietly goes wrong.

That's the gap the /competitive-profile-builder skill closes. It reads your competitors.md context file, so it already knows your landscape and positions each profile relative to what you track. It produces the same structured dimensions every time, so profiles stay comparable. And updating a profile after a competitor's move takes about 15 minutes instead of a fresh afternoon. The skill does the research, structures the output, and writes the opinionated verdict, all grounded in your actual product context rather than a blank slate.

This is the difference between competitive analysis as a project and competitive analysis as a system. A project gets done once and rots. A system stays current because keeping it current is cheap.

If you're not running Claude Code yet, two guides set the foundation: AI PM Workflows maps the recurring PM jobs worth automating, and How to Use Claude as a Product Manager walks through the setup. Once your context files are in place, the competitive skills stop being prompts you manage and become capabilities that run.

Download the Competitive Profile Builder free →

The full PM Operating System adds /landscape-mapper, /win-loss-analysis, and /swot-analysis-generator so the whole competitive workflow runs against your context. Try it on the solo plan: $39/mo, 14-day free trial, cancel anytime. See pricing →

FAQ

Can AI do competitive analysis?

Yes, and it's one of the strongest fits for AI in product work. Claude can pull a competitor's positioning, pricing, and feature set into a structured profile in minutes, then write an opinionated verdict on where you win and where they win. The catch: AI works from publicly available information. It can't surface what a sales rep heard on a call or what a customer told you in a user interview. The best competitive intelligence still comes from human conversations — AI structures and scales the analysis around them.

What's the best prompt for a competitor profile?

The full competitor profile prompt (prompt #1 above). It covers positioning, pricing, features, strengths, weaknesses, and recent moves, and it forces an opinionated verdict instead of a neutral feature list. The single instruction that improves any competitive prompt: tell Claude to end with "they win on X, we win on Y" and to defend it. A verdict is a decision you can act on. A feature matrix is homework.

How do I keep competitive intel current?

Make updating cheap. Manual profiles rot because rebuilding them costs an afternoon, so nobody does it. The fix is a consistent template plus a skill that updates in place. The /competitive-profile-builder skill reads your existing competitors.md, so when a competitor changes pricing or ships a feature, you update the one profile in about 15 minutes instead of starting over. Current intelligence is a function of how little it costs to refresh.

Is the Competitive Profile Builder free?

Yes. You can download the Competitive Profile Builder for free, along with the rest of the skills directory. The free skills are the entry point. The paid PM Operating System ($39/mo solo, 14-day free trial, cancel anytime) adds the full competitive toolkit, your context files, and the workflows that chain skills together so the whole system runs against your product.

About the Author

Ron Yang is the founder of mySecond — he builds and manages PM Operating Systems for product teams. Prior to mySecond, he led product at Aha! and is a product advisor to 25+ companies.

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