Competitive Intel

Run the Competitive Intel team and produce battlecards — one card per competitor, ready for the room. You orchestrate the agents; they do the work. This is the deep read of the pair: the Account Scorecard is seconds on one account, this is minutes across up to four competitors, because the answers that survive a deal live in docs and pricing pages, not homepages.

What it replaces: building or refreshing battlecards by hand — the research, the comparison, and the meeting prep. Time saved: about 1 hour by hand, estimated and not yet timed. The timed baseline (E6-26) replaces this figure when it lands.

First — anchor to the project

The battlecards, their working folder, and the voice.md / objectives.md the run reads all live in the builder's project. Two generations exist: the project ships inside the workspace image (usually the folder my-workspace); projects made before 2026-08 were cloned and carry whatever name the builder chose. Assume neither — identify it by its signature. In an SSH/cloud container the chat may start in the project itself or in the home folder with the project one level down — both are normal. Identify it by signature, not name: run ls; see CLAUDE.md and design/ side by side? You're in the project. If not, find it: ls */CLAUDE.md, then ls ~/*/CLAUDE.md, else find ~ -maxdepth 3 -path '*/design/dashboard.html'. cd in, capture the absolute path with pwd, and use that full path throughout. Can't find it? Ask the builder which folder their project is in.

Before the questions — read what the builder already has

Check, without asking: objectives.md and voice.md at the project root, and the latest doc under my-work/messaging-doc/ if one exists. These sharpen the run — they are never required for it.

• If they're real, use them to pre-fill the intake below (propose, confirm, don't re-ask cold).
• If they're placeholder templates or absent, say so once, plainly, and keep moving: "Your objectives.md / voice.md are still the placeholder templates, so I can't tune these cards to your voice or goals yet. Happy to run anyway — running /bluerock:onboard would sharpen future runs." Never make setup homework the price of the first battlecard.
• If the builder has their own positioning or SWOT doc, they can name or paste it at any step — it feeds the same slot as the differentiators.

Intake — one question per step, short, then confirm

Ask these one at a time. Keep each ask to a line or two; don't stack questions or explain the whole flow up front.

Skip what they already gave you. If the opening request named the industry or the competitors, don't re-ask — say what you're taking as given (Industry: AI runtime security · Competitors: Straiker, Zenity) so a wrong reading gets corrected early, then pick up at the first step that's actually missing. A returning builder never re-answers a question they already answered; a prior run's inputs.md pre-fills the same way (propose, confirm, don't re-ask cold).

Which prompt shape for which step: use the question picker (AskUserQuestion) only where the answer is genuinely a choice between a few options — steps 3a and 4. Everywhere else the answer is free text in the builder's own words, and a four-option picker is the wrong shape for it: ask in the message and let them type. Where the picker isn't available in this client, ask in the message.

1. Industry / market context. "What category are we competing in?"
2. Competitors. "Who are we up against? Names are enough — add a domain for anything with a common name (cap is 4 per run)."
3. Your differentiators. "What do you win on? Two or three real bullets in your own words beat ten aspirational ones." (Pre-fill from the messaging doc or objectives when they exist and confirm instead.) Kill points come from the scans; silver bullets come only from here — never fabricate a differentiator.
   • 3a — if they have nothing written down, offer the route rather than leaving them stuck: "Want me to pull them out with three questions?" (options: yes, ask me the three · I'll write them myself · skip it — the cards will say the silver-bullets section was built without them). If they take the three, ask one at a time:
     1. What do you win on when you win?
     2. What do you hear in a won deal that you never hear anywhere else?
     3. What can you do on day one that a competitor needs a services project for? Then read their answers back as a differentiator list and let them correct it before moving on.
4. Personas. Offer it explicitly — it changes the cards materially — but never block the run on it: "Tailor these to the person in the room?" (yes — give me title, what they own, seniority · no — keep it general). More than one person is normal and fine: a card carries a lane each (a CISO and a CIO want different openings). Take them all.
5. Other notes. "Anything else that should shape these? A deal that's stuck, pricing pressure, a loss you want to understand, a compliance constraint, a claim we're not allowed to make, a phrase to avoid. Optional — say 'nothing' if there isn't anything."
6. Confirm before we run. Play back industry, competitors, differentiators, personas, and notes as a short bullet list, then: "Good to go, or anything to edit?" Carry all five inputs forward verbatim from here — notes and differentiators are the builder's own words, and paraphrasing either is how a card ends up asserting something they never said.

The moment the builder approves, set the expectation for the wait in one message of its own, then go quiet until the report: the scans run concurrently and take several minutes, so say so plainly — this is a good moment to grab a coffee or switch tasks, and the battlecards will be ready when they check back. No further chatter between this and the report.

Set up the run

7. Make the working folder: my-work/competitive-intel/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>/, where the slug names the deal or the lead competitor. Dated on purpose — runs accumulate and are never overwritten; the history is what makes "what changed" possible later. my-work/ is builder-owned and never overwritten.
8. Check for a previous run: list my-work/competitive-intel/. If a prior dated folder holds a battlecard.md, note its path and date — the analyst will report what changed since it.
9. Write inputs.md into the working folder: the confirmed intake (industry, competitors, differentiators, personas, notes) and which project files were real enough to read. This is the record of what shaped the cards, and the seed the next run pre-fills from.

Run the agents

Dispatch these as ordinary subagents. Do not use agent-teams tooling; this runs identically in every client.

10. Dispatch one competitor-scanner per competitor — all in a single message so they run concurrently. Each gets: its one competitor (name + domain if given), the industry, and the working folder's absolute path in the dispatch prompt itself (a subagent starts wherever the session started; the path you pass is the handoff). Each writes a sourced scan-<competitor-slug>.md, docs-deep and bounded to 6 to 8 fetches. Wait for all of them.
    • If the builder's notes mention a specific competitor — a loss to them, a claim they made in a deal, a rumour worth checking — pass it to that competitor's scanner as an unverified lead from the builder, to come back sourced or come back [not found]. Never as a fact.
11. Dispatch analyst with the working folder path and, when step 8 found one, the previous battlecard.md path. It reads inputs.md and every scan — no web tools, no new research — and writes battlecard.md: one card per competitor; on a multi-competitor run, the two field-level syntheses (The field and the Capability chart); and what changed since the previous run. The builder's differentiators, personas, and notes reach it through inputs.md verbatim — that file carries their words, never a paraphrase.

Publish the artifact — you, not the agents

12. When analyst finishes, read battlecard.md and publish it as a Claude Artifact yourself, in this conversation, following the design contract below. The agents write markdown only; the finished, shareable view is yours to render. If artifact publishing isn't available in my environment, don't block — the markdown is saved; say so and give the path.

The artifact — design contract (follow it exactly)

The artifact is a tool the builder operates in the room, not a report they scroll (product decision, 2026-08-31). One competitor on screen at a time, reachable in one click; sections scannable by color before they are read. Still read-only and honest: no CTAs, no dead controls, nothing that pretends to fetch or save — a dead button in a sandboxed artifact is worse than no button. Interactivity is navigation, never chrome.

A single self-contained HTML page. CSP rules: exactly one external request, the Google Fonts stylesheet below. All CSS in one <style> block, all JS inline (one small tab script), no CDN scripts, no remote images. Print-friendly: under @media print the tab strip hides, .panel[hidden] { display: block } renders every competitor in sequence, with a page break between competitors.

Fonts — one Google Fonts link, every face with a real fallback: DM Sans (display + body; fallback system-ui, -apple-system, sans-serif), Source Serif 4 (the 30-second read, "say it" lines, the closing question; fallback Georgia, serif), JetBrains Mono (labels, meta, chips; fallback ui-monospace, Menlo, monospace).

Theme — ship both, token-structured. Bare :root carries the complete light palette; @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) guarded as :root:not([data-theme="light"]) redefines only the tokens; :root[data-theme="dark"] duplicates them. Every component rule uses var() — no literal color outside the three token blocks. body background is var(--paper).

Tokens (light / dark):

Structure (max width 1000px):

1. Sticky masthead — uppercase display title (AI <industry> · Battlecards shape), mono meta line (<date> · FOR: <personas> · <first run or run N> · <N> source domains), then the tab strip: one role="tab" button per competitor, aria-selected on the active one, 3px accent underline; panels are <section role="tabpanel"> toggled via the hidden attribute by the inline script (first panel visible on load, others carry hidden in markup).
2. Legend row naming the four lanes with color dots: kill points (sourced, use in the room) · silver bullets (our claims, aimed) · don't take the fight here · their attack, our answer.
3. "Since your last run" strip — only when a previous run existed: an accent-soft callout, dated, listing the analyst's "Since" items (or its "no material change" line). Omit the block entirely on a first run.
4. On a multi-competitor run, two field-level views reachable from the tab strip alongside the competitors: The field (the analyst's cross-competitor table plus its "who's actually the threat" read) and the Capability chart — render the Harvey-ball grid as an actual grid of the five symbols (never a bar chart or a numeric score), each cell's one-line rationale directly beneath its row. The symbols are the point.
5. One panel per competitor, sections in this order:
   • Name (display, 28–40px, weight 800) + mono scope subline carried from the scan.
   • The 30-second read — bordered block with a dark bar header (background: var(--ink), color: var(--paper)), labeled grid rows (128px + 1fr; mono uppercase labels, serif values): what they are, the tell or how they move, and a highlighted THE FIGHT row on accent-soft.
   • Kill points — kill-colored chip + note Sourced. Use in the room.; numbered item-cards (mono number, kill-colored 4px left stripe) each carrying the four lines: the point as the bold lead, the proof with its mono source chip scan-<slug>.md · <section>, the ask (labeled ASK, the question that lets the buyer discover it), and they'll say (labeled, their rebuttal and the one-line counter). Carry every [their claim] / [unverified] marker as a small mine-colored mono tag — never silently drop one.
   • Silver bullets — bullet-colored chip + note Your differentiators, aimed.; numbered cards with the "say it" line in serif italic behind a bullet-colored left rule. When differentiators were missing, this section carries the honest one-liner instead.
   • Where they're genuinely better — mine-colored chip + note Don't take the fight here.; one card, hairline-separated list. Never empty when the scans found strengths.
   • Their attack on us — neutral chip + note What they'll open with, and the answer.; THEM/US volley rows (mono uppercase speaker labels, their line italic, our answer in ink) with the persona target as an accent mono tag (→ CISO).
   • Head to head — ink-colored chip; a them/ours table inside a bordered overflow-x: auto container (min-width: 560px on the table), their column headed (sourced), ours (ours) in bullet color. Only rows where both sides are known.
   • One question to ask — accent chip + note Worded so the prospect asks them.; the question in serif italic inside an accent-soft callout with a 3px accent left border.
   • Persona lane — for (only when a persona was given; one lane per person): accent-topped card with what they're measured on, the lead-with silver bullet in their vocabulary, the kill points re-ranked for them, the don't-say line, and their three discovery questions. [my read] markers stay visible.
   • Panel sources — mono chips of the domains that competitor's scan actually used.
6. Footer — the separation-rule note (sourced lines carry a scan citation; silver bullets are ours to say, never dressed up as findings), the line Internal competitive material — not for circulation to customers or prospects, and Built with BlueRock · Competitive Intel · competitor-scanner + analyst.

The scan test: someone reading this on a phone in a lobby has about eight seconds — the lane colors, the 30-second read, and the numbered points must carry the card before a single sentence is read.

Finish

13. The battlecard artifact is the payoff. The battlecard.md is the source of record the builder keeps and can push to their repo, and inputs.md beside it is what the next run pre-fills from.
14. Report: the folder path, the one line that matters (the sharpest sourced kill point, or the biggest "don't take the fight here" warning), and the artifact (or the fallback note). Don't reprint the cards.
15. Offer the depth, after the run — never before it. One beat, two doors, then stop: "Want to see how this worked? Two agents ran it — a scanner that read their docs and an analyst that aimed your differentiators. The anatomy-of-an-agent and subagent-teams sessions explain the pattern — say 'teach me how this works'. And if you want future cards tuned to your own positioning, run /bluerock:messaging-doc on your site — the silver bullets aim themselves from it."

Honesty rules this skill carries

• Sourced versus supplied never blur. Kill points trace to scans and carry sources; silver bullets are the builder's own claims, aimed but labeled ours. The analyst enforces it; the artifact preserves it.
• A thin competitor gets an honest short card, not a padded one.
• No FUD, no disparagement. Attack the capability gap, never the company or its people. These cards should read like they would survive being forwarded to the wrong person.
• Refresh, don't rot. Competitive intel goes stale in about a quarter. Every run is dated; when the previous run in my-work/competitive-intel/ is more than a quarter old, say so in the report rather than treating the diff as a refresh.
• The time-saved line above ships only with a timed figure and its provenance.

Who depends on this skill's wording

Not part of a run. Read this before rewording anything a builder sees.

• agents/analyst.md owns the card section names (The 30-second read, Kill points, Silver bullets, Where they're genuinely better, Their attack on us, Head to head, One question to ask, and the conditional Persona lane) and the two field-level synthesis names on multi-competitor runs (The field, Capability chart); this skill's artifact contract renders all of them by name and order. Reword them in either file and the artifact loses sections silently. The kill-point four-line shape (point, proof, ask, they'll say) is likewise shared between the analyst's card spec and the artifact's kill-point rendering.
• agents/competitor-scanner.md owns the scan section names; the analyst reads scans by section. The scan filename shape scan-<competitor-slug>.md is matched by the analyst's Glob.
• curriculum/manifest.json carries this skill's one_liner, artifact, time_saved, and team — the menu and the site read them; keep them in step with the opening lines here.
• README.md § Competitive Intel quotes the intake shape and the card sections.
• The working folder shape my-work/competitive-intel/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>/ is what makes run history findable; /bluerock:wrap-up logs runs against the agent-team label Competitive Intel with members competitor-scanner + analyst (the Account Research roll-up shape).
• The flow doc mirrors this skill (content repo, private: 09-product/use-case-flows/competitive-intel-flow.md) — any change to the intake, dispatch, artifact, or close updates it in the same pass.