AI Prompts for Strategic Planning

Help me analyze my competitive landscape.

My business: [what you do and your value proposition]
Direct competitors: [list 3-5 with URLs if possible]
Indirect competitors: [alternatives customers use instead]
My biggest advantage: [what you do better]
My biggest weakness: [where competitors beat you]

Provide:
1. A competitive matrix comparing features, pricing, positioning, and target customer
2. Each competitor's strategic bet — what they're optimizing for
3. Market gaps: what no competitor is doing well
4. Threats: which competitor moves should worry you most
5. Three ways to differentiate that competitors can't easily copy
6. A monitoring plan: what to track monthly to stay informed

Run a SWOT analysis for my business.

Business: [description, stage, and size]
Industry: [market and trends]
Target market: [who you serve]
Recent wins: [what's going well]
Recent challenges: [what's been hard]
Market changes: [trends affecting your industry]

Create:
1. A detailed SWOT matrix with 5-7 items per quadrant
2. The most important item in each quadrant and why it matters most
3. SO strategies: how strengths can exploit opportunities
4. WT strategies: how to address weaknesses before threats arrive
5. A 90-day action plan based on the SWOT findings
6. Three assumptions in this analysis that could be wrong

Build a 12-month growth roadmap for my business.

Current state: [revenue, customers, team size]
Growth goal: [where you want to be in 12 months]
Growth channels used: [what's working now]
Budget for growth: [monthly investment available]
Constraints: [limited team, competitive market, etc.]
Biggest unknown: [what you're most uncertain about]

Create:
1. A phased roadmap: Q1 foundation, Q2 acceleration, Q3 optimization, Q4 scaling
2. Three growth bets ranked by effort vs. expected impact
3. Key metrics to track each quarter with specific targets
4. Resource allocation: where to invest time and money each quarter
5. Kill criteria: when to abandon a growth initiative that isn't working
6. The single biggest risk to hitting your 12-month goal

Help me define my market positioning.

Product/service: [what you offer]
Target customer: [who you serve and their key pain point]
Competitors: [who else solves this problem]
Current perception: [how customers describe you today]
Desired perception: [how you want to be known]
Price point: [premium / mid-market / budget]

Develop:
1. A positioning statement using the framework: For [target], [product] is the [category] that [key benefit] unlike [alternative] because [reason to believe]
2. Three positioning options with trade-offs for each
3. A messaging hierarchy: tagline, elevator pitch, value propositions
4. Proof points to support the positioning (what evidence backs it up)
5. A 'positioning test' — questions to ask customers to validate it
6. How this positioning should change your homepage, pricing page, and sales pitch

Help me set OKRs for [this quarter / this year].

Company mission: [one sentence]
Top priorities: [3-5 things that matter most right now]
Team size: [number and departments]
Previous OKRs: [last quarter's OKRs and whether you hit them]
Biggest challenge: [what's blocking progress]

Design:
1. 3-4 company-level objectives with 3-4 key results each
2. Each key result must be measurable with a specific target number
3. Alignment check: how each OKR connects to the company mission
4. Anti-goals: what you're explicitly NOT pursuing this quarter
5. A scoring rubric for grading OKRs at quarter-end (0.0 to 1.0)
6. A weekly check-in template to track OKR progress

Help me decide whether my business needs to pivot.

Current business model: [how you make money today]
What's not working: [specific problems and metrics]
Market feedback: [what customers and prospects say]
New opportunity: [the potential pivot direction, if you have one]
Resources available: [cash runway, team skills, existing assets]
Emotional attachment: [what you don't want to give up]

Analyze:
1. Honest assessment: is this a execution problem or a model problem?
2. Three signals that say 'pivot now' vs. three that say 'persist and iterate'
3. If pivoting: the minimum viable pivot (smallest change with biggest impact)
4. If persisting: the 90-day experiment to run before reconsidering
5. What assets from the current model transfer to the new direction
6. A decision framework: the specific criteria that would trigger a pivot decision