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Competitor · Diagnose, Explore

Value curve / Strategy canvas

Draws what every competitor in a market competes on, and how hard. When all the lines sit on top of each other you have found why margins are poor, and roughly what to do about it.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
01 Diagnose, 02 Explore
Works at
Business
Maturity
Early startup → Large organisation
Time
Half a day

What it is

From Kim and Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy: a single chart showing the factors an industry competes on and how much each player invests in each. Its power is diagnostic — convergent curves explain price competition better than any amount of market analysis.

Competing factors
The horizontal axis: what the industry offers and competes on. Drawn from what is marketed and what buyers evaluate, not from internal capability language.
Offering level
The vertical axis: how much each player delivers on each factor, rated relative to the industry rather than absolutely.
The value curve
One line per competitor. The shape is the firm's strategic profile, whether or not anyone chose it deliberately.
Convergence
Where curves overlap. Convergent factors are table stakes at best and wasted investment at worst, and they are why the industry competes on price.
Divergence
Where a curve departs from the pack. A strategy that produces no divergence has not made a choice.
The mistake people makeRating your own curve from internal opinion produces a flattering line that is higher than customers would draw. Get at least some customer evidence, or mark the curve as self-assessed so nobody mistakes it for fact.
What it’s forEveryone in your market competes on the same handful of factors and you suspect that is the problem.
What it’s not forYou are genuinely differentiated already. The curve will confirm it at some length.

How you run it

  1. List the factors the industry competes onFive to twelve. These are what buyers are offered and what marketing talks about — price, speed, range, service, warranty, and so on.
  2. Rate every player on every factorHigh or low relative to the industry, not absolute. Include yourself and be honest, ideally using customer evidence rather than internal opinion.
  3. Draw the curves and look for overlapWhere the lines converge, competition is on price by definition, because nothing else distinguishes anyone.
  4. Ask which factors the industry over-servesThere is usually at least one factor everyone competes hard on that customers do not actually value much. That is where cost can come out.
  5. Draw the curve you wantDivergence is the point: a curve that looks like everyone else's is not a strategy. Then cost it — a new curve is a set of investment and elimination decisions.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans — from £19 a month

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • The factors the industry actually competes on
  • An honest rating of yourself and two or three rivals
  • Some customer evidence, or an admission that there is none

You’ll end up with

  • A canvas with your curve against competitors
  • The factors where everyone is identical
  • A proposed new curve, and what it costs

Runs well with

Acquisition screen and synergy thesisAdjacency mapAI opportunity mapAI risk classification and governance