Write your Company Strategy in 30 Minutes or Less

There are entire professions dedicated to strategy: strategy consultants, strategy managers, and so on. Everything seems to be about strategy. But really, strategy is just a set of choices about how to get from where you are today to where you want to go (i.e. achieve your mission / vision).

With ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, you can accomplish in 30 minutes what would have taken a consultant 2+ weeks and cost you $200k. Let’s dive in:

You are a strategy analyst working for {company}. Here's their website: {URL}

Research them to figure out their competitive set. Indicate the rationale for including any given competitor.

That should spit out a short research report about the company. Then, let’s ask about competitors:

Based on your last response, now create a list of "benefits" (i.e. the benefit of any given feature) that the competitive set delivers to their customers. Use harvey balls to indicate offering quality.

For each combination indicate empty = doesn't offer benefit, half full = offers benefit, full = best in class benefit

Be exhaustive about both features and competitors.

That will result in a matrix of competitors and features, with scores. Then, we can stack rank the competitive set:

Now find user reviews (on sites like G2, Trustpilot, etc) to come up with a weighting schema for each benefit. 

Subsequently, rank each of the competitors by weighted average (where empty harvey ball = 0, half = 1, full = 2).

If we look at the top competitors, what can we learn from them? Let’s research their strategies:

Ok, you are the best McKinsey strategy consultant in the world. Now identify product announcements, strategy memos, new features, release notes, etc. that would indicate the direction of the rank 1, 2, 4, and 5 competitors. 

Create a coherent picture of what each competitor is trying to do in the next 12-18 months. 

Now we can use competitive intelligence to position ourselves:

Based on this, define a strategy for {company} for the next 12-18mos.

Consider the 4Cs:
Company - what unique or underutilized assets can the firm leverage? what product features should be developed?
Category - how can the company differentiate from the competitive set in a compelling way?
Customer - what ICP(s) should the company target?
Channel - what channel(s) should the company use to target their customer.

Strategy is about choices in the face of finite resources. A meaningful choice should preclude the business from doing something else. 

If you try this (or remix it in interesting ways), reply back and let me know.