scout

MANDATORY PREPARATION

Invoke /product-thinking — it contains product principles and the Context Gathering Protocol. Follow the protocol before proceeding — if no product context exists yet, you MUST run /teach-acumen first.

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Mindset: Competitors are everyone hired for the same job — not just companies with similar feature lists. A spreadsheet is a competitor. Doing nothing is a competitor. The intern who does it manually is a competitor.

Competition is about who else gets hired for the job, not who has more checkmarks on a feature matrix. Users don't compare products in a vacuum — they compare the pain of switching against the pain of staying.

Behavior

When called with a specific competitor or market area: Research and add/update that entry in the map. Ask the user what they know, what prompted the scout, and what they're worried about.

When called without argument: Review the full map for staleness and gaps. Flag competitors that haven't been updated recently. Identify missing entrants.

When called with "deep [competitor]" or for strategic decisions: Switch to deep analysis mode (see below).

Research Process (Standard Mode)

1. Read .acumen.md for product context — users, job to be done, strategy, deliberate exclusions
2. Read .acumen/competitors.md for existing map
3. For each competitor (new or updated), gather:
   • Their website URL
   • Their category: Direct (same job, same approach), Indirect (same job, different approach), or Adjacent (different job, overlapping users)
   • What job they're hired for (may overlap partially with yours)
   • How they position themselves
   • Their actual strengths (not what they claim — what users would say)
   • Their real weaknesses (not surface-level — structural ones)
   • Their moat (network effects, data, switching costs, brand, distribution)
   • Recent moves (launches, pivots, pricing changes, acquisitions)
4. Assess feature parity traps — features competitors have that you might reflexively copy but shouldn't

Deep Analysis Mode

When the user needs strategic depth — evaluating a specific competitor, entering a new market, or making positioning decisions — go deeper:

1. Define the Job

What progress is the user trying to make, in what context?

2. Map Everyone Hired for It

Direct competitors, indirect competitors, substitutes, and the status quo. The status quo — doing nothing — is the most common competitor and the hardest to beat.

3. Segment Users by Behavior

Different segments hire different solutions. Don't treat the market as monolithic.

Segment	Context	Current solution	Switching trigger

4. Moat Evaluation

For each relevant competitor:

• Network effects — does the product get better as more people use it?
• Switching costs — what would a user lose by leaving?
• Data advantages — does usage create proprietary data?
• Scale economics — does unit cost decrease meaningfully with growth?

5. Feature Parity Analysis

For every feature they have that you don't:

• Does their user segment actually overlap with ours?
• Is this a must-have for the job, or a nice-to-have for their positioning?
• Would building this dilute our focus?
• What would we stop doing to build this?

The features you deliberately skip are as strategic as the ones you build.

6. Positioning Sharpening

• We're the [X] that [Y] for [Z]
• If your positioning statement could apply to a competitor, it's not positioning — it's a category description
• Good positioning makes a clear tradeoff

7. Where We Win / Where We Lose

Specific scenarios, not generalizations. "We win when teams need X under constraint Y; we lose when users prioritize Z."

Deep Analysis Output

In addition to updating .acumen/competitors.md, output:

1. The job — what progress users are hiring a solution to make
2. User segments — who hires differently, and why
3. Who else gets hired — direct, indirect, substitutes, status quo
4. Where we win / where we lose — specific scenarios
5. Moats — what we have, what we're building, what we lack
6. Positioning statement — we're the [X] that [Y] for [Z]
7. Feature parity traps — what NOT to copy and the strategic reasoning

Standard Output

Write to .acumen/competitors.md:

# Competitor Map

_Last updated: [date]_

## The Job
[One sentence: the job users hire this category of product to do]

## Direct Competitors
[Same job, same approach]

### [Competitor Name]
- **Website**: [URL]
- **Position**: [How they frame themselves]
- **Strengths**: [What they're genuinely good at]
- **Weaknesses**: [Structural, not cosmetic]
- **Moat**: [What makes them hard to displace]
- **Recent moves**: [Last 6 months]
- **Feature parity trap**: [Features they have that we should NOT blindly copy, and why]

## Indirect Competitors
[Same job, different approach — includes DIY alternatives, manual processes, spreadsheets]

### [Competitor Name]
- **Website**: [URL if applicable]
- **Position**: [How they frame themselves]
- **Strengths**: [What they're genuinely good at]
- **Weaknesses**: [Structural, not cosmetic]
- **Moat**: [What makes them hard to displace]
- **Recent moves**: [Last 6 months]

## Adjacent Competitors
[Different job, overlapping users — could expand into your space]

### [Competitor Name]
- **Website**: [URL]
- **Position**: [How they frame themselves]
- **Why they matter**: [How they could become direct competitors]

Maintenance

Each entry should carry a last-updated date. When refreshing the full map:

• Flag entries older than 3 months as potentially stale
• Ask the user if any competitors have made notable moves
• Check if new entrants should be added

NEVER:

• List competitors you can't say something specific about — no padding
• Confuse "they have a feature we don't" with "they're winning"
• Write generic strengths like "good UX" — be specific or don't list it
• Ignore non-obvious competitors (habits, workarounds, manual processes)
• Present the map as static — it's a living document, always in progress

Reference

Consult competitive-intelligence for deeper frameworks on competitive mapping, positioning canvases, and strategic response patterns.