When to load this mode
The team faces a positioning, pricing, or messaging decision and someone asks "who are we competing against?" Or the user lists three obvious competitors and you suspect those aren't the ones beating them. Or Copy is about to ship a "the only X that does Y" hero.
Pairs with jtbd-interviews.md and audience-discovery.md. Interviews give you the real competitor set; the scan tells you what to do about it.
The premise
A competitor isn't a company in your category. It's anything the customer weighed against your product on the day they decided. That set almost always includes things you wouldn't put in a SWOT:
- Non-consumption — doing nothing. The biggest competitor most products face.
- Adjacent-category solutions — a meal kit competes against frozen pizza, takeout, and the partner cooking.
- Custom workarounds — the spreadsheet, the group chat, the Google Doc.
- The thing they tried before that didn't work — and the scar tissue from it.
The named-category competitor — the one your user is watching — often ranks third or fourth in actual deal loss.
The procedure
1. Mine the transcripts for the "instead of" list. Write down every alternative customers mentioned, verbatim. Don't filter. The Google Doc someone built five years ago is a competitor.
2. Rank by switching cost, not by similarity. For each alternative, score the switching cost (time, money, identity, sunk cost, social proof, learning curve). The lowest switching cost is what the customer keeps drifting back to. Non-consumption usually wins.
3. Map unmet pains across alternatives. For each, list the pains that alternative leaves on the table. If three alternatives fail at the same thing, that's your wedge.
4. Write a one-page competitor map. Per alternative:
- Name (their words — "the spreadsheet my CFO built")
- What the customer hired it for
- Where it works | Where it falls down (verbatim quotes)
- Switching cost to leave it
- Customer's gut-feel about leaving ("relief," "guilt," "fear")
5. Stamp it in TEAM_MEMORY.md under ## Research → ### Competitive landscape. Sales uses it for objections; Copy uses the gap quotes; Offer prices against switching costs.
Decision rules
- Take an alternative seriously when it appears in 3+ transcripts. It can be unglamorous (Excel, Notes app, "my assistant"). Frequency beats prestige.
- Demote a named market competitor when customers know it exists and explicitly didn't consider it. Not a competitor — a brand they've ruled out.
- Treat non-consumption as the default competitor. If you can't say why the customer should switch from doing nothing, you don't have a product yet.
- Stop scanning when you've covered ~80% of mentions. Long tail isn't worth the cycles.
Anti-patterns
- Don't reverse-engineer features. Their pricing page is not market research. Read their churn reviews, not their landing page.
- Don't G2-grid the analysis. Comparison matrices with checkmarks make the team feel rigorous and tell the buyer nothing.
- Don't position against your category leader. "We're the X-killer" is a tell you haven't found your own job. Their customers are not your prospects.
- Don't ignore the workarounds. The spreadsheet doesn't have a marketing budget — that's why it's beating you. It feels free even when it isn't.
- Don't get scan-paralysis. Three days of desk research instead of three interviews means you're avoiding talking to customers.
Before / after
Before (the standard SWOT competitor list):
Direct: Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp. Indirect: Trello, Notion. Strengths vs. them: better AI, lower price, faster onboarding.
Team writes "AI-powered project management tool" copy, runs ads against Asana, gets clicks from Asana users who aren't switching.
After (customer's actual competitor set, from transcripts):
Top: non-consumption. 7 of 12 — "we just used Slack and a shared Google Doc, fine until it wasn't." Switching cost: low. Pain it leaves: nothing searchable, decisions lost, new hires can't catch up. Gut-feel: "I keep meaning to set something up but it never makes it to the top of the list."
Second: the homegrown Notion setup. 5 of 12 — built by an early employee who left. Switching cost: high (sunk effort, "we built this"). Pain: nobody else can maintain it. Gut-feel: "I'd feel bad ripping it out but honestly it's a problem."
Third: Asana. 3 of 12 — tried, churned within 90 days. Switching cost to return: low but scarred. Pain: "felt like homework." Gut-feel: "Burned."
Now Copy writes for the "we just used Slack" buyer — deepest pain, lowest switching cost. Sales has a Notion-displacement playbook with the "honestly it's a problem" objection-flip. Offer knows "no setup required" is worth more than another integration, because setup is the wall non-consumption hides behind.