Run a market and competitive analysis

Use this when: you need a defensible, committed read on internal position, competitive structure, macro forces, or portfolio mix — one artifact per question. Prerequisites: product-strategy pack installed. Result: one or more committed analysis artifacts in docs/product/shaping/ — swot-analysis.md, competitive-landscape.md, macro-environment.md, or portfolio-position.md — each a standalone readable document.

You need a defensible picture of where the product stands — internal position, competitive pressure, macro forces, portfolio mix — and you want each part committed as an artifact a stakeholder can read, not a slide that evaporates.

Run a PESTLE scan, run Porter's Five Forces, and run a SWOT for our payments-market expansion.

Pillar 1 gives you four analysis frameworks, one per question. Run the ones the situation warrants; you rarely need all four in the same week.

This guide assumes you have the pack installed and know what SWOT and Porter’s Five Forces are. It covers which framework answers which question, what each writes, and where the analyses overlap.

Pick the framework by the question

Each skill owns one question and writes one artifact to docs/product/shaping/.

The question you’re asking	Skill	Artifact
Where are we strong and exposed, and what’s open to us?	run-swot	swot-analysis.md
How much pressure is the competitive structure putting on us?	run-porters-five-forces	competitive-landscape.md
What macro forces are moving under us?	run-pestle-analysis	macro-environment.md
Where does each product sit in the portfolio?	run-bcg-matrix	portfolio-position.md

Reach for the full reference table — every Pillar-1, -2, and -3 skill in one place — at Frameworks and artifacts.

Run the internal-and-immediate read: SWOT

Start here when you need a fast, shared read on the product’s own position.

Run a SWOT for the payments product.

run-swot works the four quadrants — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — and commits swot-analysis.md. Strengths and Weaknesses are internal and present-tense; Opportunities and Threats are external and forward-looking. The common failure is a SWOT that lists adjectives. Push each entry to a concrete claim with a consequence: not “strong brand” but “brand recognition lets us charge a 15% premium in the enterprise segment.” A quadrant of vague nouns produces a document nobody acts on.

Run the competitive-structure read: Porter’s Five Forces

Use this when the pressure is coming from the market’s shape, not one rival.

Run Porter’s Five Forces on the market we’re entering.

run-porters-five-forces assesses Supplier Power, Buyer Power, threat of New Entrants, threat of Substitutes, and the intensity of Rivalry, and commits competitive-landscape.md. It answers how attractive is this market’s structure — a different question from who are our competitors. Rate each force and say what makes it high or low; a force marked “high” with no mechanism is an assertion, not an analysis. Where Porter and SWOT overlap — Threats in the SWOT, New Entrants and Substitutes in Porter — let the SWOT stay at the headline and the Five Forces carry the structural detail. Don’t duplicate the same paragraph into both artifacts.

Run the macro read: PESTLE

Use this when the forces that matter sit outside the market entirely.

Run a PESTLE scan for the regulated-markets expansion.

run-pestle-analysis sweeps Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors and commits macro-environment.md. The pitfall is completeness theatre — filling all six categories evenly when only two actually move your product. Weight the categories to the decision. A fintech expansion is mostly Legal and Political; a consumer-hardware line is mostly Economic and Environmental. Note the thin categories as thin rather than padding them.

Run the portfolio read: BCG matrix

Use this when the unit of analysis is a set of products, not one product.

Place our product line on a BCG matrix.

run-bcg-matrix positions each product across Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks, and Dogs on the growth-share grid, and commits portfolio-position.md. It needs more than one product to be meaningful — a single-product company gets little from it. Ground the placement in the two axes it actually uses (market growth and relative share); a placement with no numbers behind it is a guess dressed as a matrix.

Sequencing and overlap

There is no fixed order, but a common flow is PESTLE and Porter to establish the outside, then SWOT to fold that into the product’s own position, then the BCG matrix if a portfolio decision is on the table. Each artifact stands alone, so a reader can open competitive-landscape.md without having read the SWOT. When two frameworks touch the same fact, cite it once in the artifact that owns it and reference across rather than copying — drift between two copies of the same claim is worse than a cross-reference.

These four are the analysis half of Pillar 1. The forcing functions that turn this picture into committed direction — the OKR cascade, the PRFAQ, stakeholder synthesis — are the other half; see Cascade OKRs into the shaping queue.

What you have now

You have one or more committed analysis artifacts in docs/product/shaping/ that answer the specific strategic questions you chose. Use the market picture to cascade objectives or set the direction for the next product decision.

See also

• Run your first SWOT — the guided first pass at run-swot.
• Cascade OKRs into the shaping queue — turn the picture into build-ready work.
• Frameworks and artifacts — the complete skill-to-artifact map.
• Why strategy is its own seat — why these artifacts sit upstream of the build packs.