swot-analysis

SWOT Analysis (Evidence-Cited)

Purpose

Build an evidence-cited SWOT of one company — yours or a competitor's — from the public record:
use or gather evidence → four labeled quadrants → crossings → next-step options. Strengths and
weaknesses come from documented capability and customer voice; opportunities and threats from market,
competitor, and macro signals. Every entry carries a source and a label, and the analysis ends with
the S-O and W-T crossings — because a SWOT without "so what" is a parking lot with four sections.

Input

Works best with: the company to analyze, the scope (whole company or one product line/market),
and the decision this SWOT should support.
Also useful: the perspective — theirs, or yours competing with them — and any research already in
session (a competitive-research-snapshot, VoC themes, a
landscape scan, company-intel output): the SWOT then synthesizes
instead of re-searching.

Input supplied inline with the invocation — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an
appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as answers already given. Use it against the question budget;
don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill opens with at most 3 questions (company + scope,
decision, perspective) and proceeds on labeled assumptions if they go unanswered.

Example invocation: Evidence-cited SWOT on [Competitor A]'s mid-market product line, from our perspective — supports the Q3 positioning refresh. Last month's snapshot is attached.

Key Concepts

Governing protocol: honors the autonomous-investigation

contract — question budget of 3, search-plan gate, Fact/Inference/Assumption labels, Just Enough
Mode (max 5 ranked entries per quadrant), stable schema, 4-option Final Step. Disciplines: OSINT +
FININT + HUMINT per intelligence-collection-disciplines.

Quadrant discipline. S and W are internal and current; O and T are external. The most

common SWOT error is an "opportunity" that requires the company to act — that's a strategy, not an
opportunity. Flag it when you catch it; catching it is half the teaching.

Claimed vs. evidenced advantage. Strengths sourced from the company's own marketing are

claims; strengths corroborated by customer voice, filings, or independent coverage are evidence.
Customer voice weighs heaviest on weaknesses — buyers document weaknesses vendors won't.

The crossings are the deliverable. S-O names the attack (which strength unlocks which

opportunity); W-T names the exposure (which weakness a threat finds first). SWOT is an input to
moves, not a wall poster.

Companion, not substitute: porters-five-forces reads the

industry's structure; this reads one company's position within it. Run both when the decision
is market entry.

When NOT to use: internal-only SWOT from private knowledge → run it as a team workshop with

your evidence; the whole competitor set → snapshot first, SWOT the one or two that matter.

Do-not-invent list: financials, customer wins, market share, product claims, roadmap items.

Application

Check session for existing evidence (snapshot, VoC themes, landscape scan, company-intel).

Present → synthesize from it; search only gaps and staleness.

Credit inline context, then ask only the unanswered questions (max 3):

1. Which company, and whole-company or one product line?
2. What decision should this support?
3. From whose perspective — theirs, or yours competing with them?

If researching fresh, show the 3-bullet search plan — source sweep (filings, reviews, press,

pricing pages, hiring signals), how internal vs. external evidence will be separated, how facts
split from inference. Continue unless revised.

Emit the schema below exactly.

Output schema (do not reorder)

~~~markdown

SWOT: [Company / Scope]

As-of date: | Decision supported: | Perspective:

1. Strengths (internal, evidenced)

[Entry] — [evidence: URL, date] — [Fact/Inference]

[Max 5, ranked by defensibility]

2. Weaknesses (internal, evidenced)

[Entry — customer voice weighs heaviest here] — [URL] — [label]

[Max 5, ranked by exploitability]

3. Opportunities (external)

[Entry — market/macro signal] — [URL] — [label]

[Max 5, ranked by fit to their strengths]

4. Threats (external)

[Entry — competitor/regulatory/technology signal] — [URL] — [label]

[Max 5, ranked by likelihood x damage]

5. The Crossings (the "so what")

S-O (attack): [strength that unlocks which opportunity — 1-2 moves, labeled Inference]

W-T (exposure): [weakness a threat will find first — 1-2 risks, labeled Inference]

For your decision: [what this SWOT says about the decision named above, in 2 sentences]

Assumptions to Validate

[Assumption 1] / [Assumption 2] / [Assumption 3]

~~~

A copy/paste fill-in version of this schema, with quality checks, lives in template.md.

Final Step (offer exactly 4 options)

Run the W-T exposure into a battle card or risk plan (battle-card-builder)

SWOT a second company for side-by-side comparison

Feed the crossings into a positioning statement (positioning-statement)

Schedule-ready version: which entries should a quarterly re-run watch?

Accept 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 and 2, Verbose Mode, or a custom path.

Examples

The quadrant discipline catching a disguised strategy (fictional):

> Draft opportunity: "expand into the compliance-automation segment." Caught and reclassified — that
> requires them to act, so it's a candidate strategy, not an opportunity. The underlying
> opportunity, restated externally: "compliance-automation demand in their install base is growing —
> Fact ([industry survey, URL]) — and no incumbent serves it." Now the S-O crossing can test
> whether any documented strength (their services arm, their audit-trail architecture) actually
> unlocks it — or whether it's a mirage that flatters the roadmap.

Claimed vs. evidenced, side by side:

> - Their site claims "enterprise-grade reliability" — that's a claim, not a strength.
> - Strength as evidenced: "publishes a status page with 26 months of >99.95% uptime — Fact
> ([status page, URL]) — and reliability praise recurs across independent reviews — Fact
> ([review site, URL])." Ranked #2 by defensibility: verifiable, sustained, hard to copy quickly.

See examples/sample.md for a complete worked SWOT (fictional FSM-software
market, same scenario as the suite's chain examples) that synthesizes from a snapshot and watch
report already in session. examples/sample-industrial.md runs the
same quadrant discipline on an industrial evidence diet, including a fortress-move warning in the
S-O crossing.

Common Pitfalls

The four-box brainstorm. Unsourced entries from a conference room are opinions arranged in

quadrants. Evidence per entry is what separates this SWOT from the one nobody trusts.

Opportunities that are strategies. "Launch in Europe" is a move; "European demand outpacing

local supply" is an opportunity. If the entry needs the company to act, reclassify it.

Marketing-sourced strengths. A strengths quadrant built from the company's own website is

their positioning statement wearing your logo. Corroborate or label as claim.

Skipping the crossings. Four tidy quadrants and no moves. The S-O attack and W-T exposure are

why the analysis exists — the decision-support sentence at the end is the test it must pass.

Wish-list contamination. Internal hopes ("we'd love better onboarding") placed in W, or

fears in T, without evidence. Every quadrant works the public record; wishes go to the roadmap.

References

autonomous-investigation (Workflow) — the governing protocol

intelligence-collection-disciplines (Component) — the evidence channels behind each quadrant

porters-five-forces (Workflow) — industry structure; run both for market-entry decisions

competitive-research-snapshot (Workflow) — upstream evidence base

voice-of-customer-miner (Workflow) — the weaknesses quadrant's best source

positioning-statement (Component) — consumes the crossings

SWOT framework as standard strategy practice; adapted from

market-intelligence/swot-analysis-prompt.md in the
https://github.com/deanpeters/product-manager-prompts repo.