Competitive intel — teardowns at the speed of the news cycle

TL;DR. Take a competitor (or three) and produce an evidence-backed teardown — positioning, pricing, recent moves, sales talk track, where we win / where we lose. Four hours of analyst work down to 45 minutes per teardown. The where we lose section is what separates a useful teardown from a marketing exercise.

Job to be done#

Produce an evidence-backed teardown of a competitor: positioning, pricing, recent moves, the talk track sales should use, and an honest where we lose section.

Who runs it#

Product marketing or competitive-intelligence lead.

Inputs (inbox/)#

• Competitor list (URL, key product names)
• Recent collateral if available, in /inbox/competitors/[name]/
• House battlecard template

Outputs (output/)#

• teardown-[competitor].docx — 4–6 pages
• comparison-matrix.xlsx — row per feature, column per competitor + own product
• battlecard-[competitor].docx — sales-ready 1-pager

Prompt seed#

Research [competitor].
Read everything in /inbox/competitors/[competitor]/.
Produce a teardown in /output/teardown-[competitor].docx covering:
- Positioning (1 paragraph)
- Pricing (table; clearly mark public vs inferred)
- Last 90 days of moves (cited)
- Three likely sales objections from buyers comparing them to us
- Three honest places we lose
Add the competitor as a column to /inbox/comparison-matrix.xlsx
(preserve other columns).
Generate /output/battlecard-[competitor].docx using the structure in
/inbox/battlecard-template.docx.

Quality bar#

• Where we lose is honest, not euphemistic. Push back when Cowork softens.
• Pricing claims labelled public or inferred.
• All claims cited or explicitly marked unsourced.
• Common trip-up: hallucinated pricing. Verify, or mark inferred.

Time saved (typical)#

Four hours down to 45 minutes per teardown — the most consistently absurd time-saved number in any of our workflows.

Upgrade path#

• Convert to a competitive-teardown skill.
• Add a connector to a competitive-intelligence tool (Klue, Crayon) where licensed.

Tinkso's take#

The where we lose section is what separates a useful teardown from a marketing exercise. We tune the prompt aggressively for honesty here — over-flattering your own product is the most common failure mode, even on Sonnet 4.6. The fix is in the prompt instruction ("three honest places we lose") and in coaching the operator to push back on the first draft.