Problem
A competitor list could preserve names, but it could not explain who we were really competing with or what that meant for our market position.
Product management proof
Building a Competitor Model for Business Decisions
I built a competitor model that turned a list of companies into a clearer view of who we were really competing with, how they differed from us and from each other, and what those differences meant for our business.
What I owned
I turned qualitative research on 17 companies into an ontology model with explicit attributes, weights, and comparison logic.
Result
The team gained a clearer view of competitor differences, market position, headwinds, tailwinds, and strategic risk.
The target company name and selected details have been generalized to preserve confidentiality.
The situation
A conventional list of competitors could name the market, but it could not explain who we were really competing with, how those companies differed from us and from each other, or what those differences meant for the business.
The real question was how different companies overlapped with the target business across multiple dimensions and where that overlap was most strategically meaningful.
That mattered because competitor language can get slippery during fundraising. Two companies can sound similar in a deck while differing completely in buyer, workflow, product surface, or business-model implication.
I took ownership of turning that ambiguity into a model the team could use to explain market position, headwinds, tailwinds, and strategic risk.
The approach
I designed an ontology-based model that translated qualitative market research on 17 external companies into explicit enumerated attributes. I wanted the disagreement to get sharper, not disappear: if someone challenged the ranking, the model should show which assumption they were really challenging.
The model then calculated category-level similarity scores and a configurable composite score.
What I built
The workbook evaluates each company across six similarity dimensions:
- target audience
- core value proposition
- product features
- potential gaps in offering
- unique selling points
- competitive advantage
The ontology table defines the available qualitative attribute values for each category. The calculation layer converts selected attributes into comparable similarity scores and supports adjustable weighting for the composite score.
Why it matters
The model makes strategic reasoning easier to explain. It replaces an informal competitor list with a repeatable framework for comparing business models, testing assumptions, and identifying meaningful overlap. It also makes the inputs visible, so the analysis can be challenged and recalibrated rather than treated as a black-box ranking.
That was the strategic point. The workbook did not pretend to settle the market question forever. It gave the team a better way to argue about it. It also gave the team a shared language for explaining why one comparable mattered more than another.
Result
The model became the team’s core reference for reasoning about which companies were and were not the closest comparables. That question surfaced repeatedly during fundraising, and the workbook gave the team a consistent framework for discussing the answer internally and explaining the logic behind it.
What I learned
A quantitative score is most valuable when its qualitative assumptions remain visible. Formalizing the ontology improved the analysis because it made disagreement more useful: individual attributes and weights could be challenged directly instead of debating an opaque overall ranking.