Discovery & Research · master area · gap
Competitive Analysis
Understanding existing solutions as Discovery input — not as a marketing exercise. What the named person uses today instead of nothing, and what they would substitute if our product disappeared. Currently a gap in the corpus.
This is a gap area
The chain has not yet produced a considered discipline for competitive analysis as Discovery input. The framing here is provisional. Filling this is part of the corpus's job.
Owners: PO, Designer Phase it would live in: Before We Build (Volume II)
What the practice would look like
Competitive analysis applied to the moment we're shaping, not to the market in aggregate:
- Identify substitutes. "What does Gal do today instead of using our shortcut?" The substitute might be: another product, a manual workaround, a Slack-thread-with-a-colleague, or simply absorbing the friction.
- Witness the substitute. Same observation discipline. Sit with the person using the substitute. Time-stamped notes. What does it do well? Where does it fail them?
- Map the boundary. "What does the substitute do that we can't easily match? What does it not do that we can?" Honest both directions.
- Frame the prediction against the substitute. "Our shortcut saves 32 minutes per session. The current workaround (post-it notes in the grading book) saves them 5 minutes. The differential is 27."
Why this is a gap
The chain's discovery discipline is deep on the person. It is thin on the alternative. A team that observes only its own users may build the right product for the wrong market context — one where a competitor's product already does 80% of the job at half the friction.
The complementary craft, Market & Competitive Awareness, is also a gap. Together they would form the outward-facing leg of discovery — observing not just the person, but the landscape the person navigates.
What it would NOT be
- A feature matrix. "We do X, they do Y, we don't do Z." That is sales analysis, not Discovery.
- An exercise in differentiation. "What makes us unique?" That is positioning, not Discovery.
- A reason to copy. "They have feature X, so we should too." That is solution-first, the chain's anti-pattern.
The discipline would be the same as observation: witness what exists, in use, before deciding what to build.
Related crafts
- Market & Competitive Awareness — the strategy-level counterpart
- Observation / Field Research — the methodology this would borrow