My competitive intelligence skill

The Claude Cowork skill I use to run competitive intelligence - plus how to set it up and adapt it for your own market.

Competitive intelligence has always been a key part of the product marketing to-do list. Everyone agrees it matters, and most people agree PMM should own it. What’s changed is that AI has turned a laborious job into a largely automated one.

That’s exposed two things:

1. Most of us have been doing competitive intelligence inconsistently.

2. It’s now dangerously easy to generate an enormous document on a competitor, when actually brevity is essential. Your audience is time-poor - be it a sales rep who needs the one insight that wins a deal, or a CMO skimming your quarterly report.

So I built a skill for it: one mode for an initial strategic review, one for always-on monitoring. I use it in client projects - both for my own work, but also for any client leaning on me to provide AI prompts and skills for their team. But this felt like a good one to share with readers of The Product Marketer.

Skills

If you haven’t come across them, a skill is essentially a markdown instruction file that Claude reads before doing a task. Think of it as a reusable brief: instead of typing out the same detailed instructions every time, you write them once, properly, and Claude follows them whenever you trigger the task. (They work in Claude Code and Cowork today, and you can paste the same file into a Claude project’s instructions if that’s your setup.)

The skill file is at the bottom of this post. Copy it, adapt it, make it yours. It should also work in ChatGPT, Gemini or whatever your tool of choice is.

What the skill actually does

This is not a battlecard generator. It’s more a strategic input for positioning decisions.

The skill runs in two modes.

Deep Strategic is for the first time you map a landscape - a new market entry, a positioning refresh, a messaging project kick-off. You give it multiple competitor URLs and it produces individual profiles plus a comparative view: common positioning patterns, whitespace, how each player is trying to differentiate, and what that means for your own positioning discussion.