Competitive Intelligence from Code: How Gap Analysis Works

Traditional competitive analysis: a PM spends a week using competitor products, screenshots features, and creates a spreadsheet comparing capabilities.

Problem: the spreadsheet is subjective, incomplete, and outdated the moment a competitor ships an update.

Automated Competitive Intelligence

What if you could automatically:

1. Identify your competitors (from website analysis and market data)
2. Catalog their features (from public documentation, changelogs, and product pages)
3. Map those features against your codebase (does your code implement this capability?)
4. Score each gap by implementation complexity (based on your actual architecture)

This is what Glue's Gap Atlas does. Not competitive guesswork — competitive intelligence derived from code analysis.

How It Works

Step 1: Competitor Detection

Analyze your product's market positioning and automatically identify relevant competitors. Filter out integration partners (you don't compete with your Stripe integration).

Step 2: Feature Extraction

Crawl competitor documentation, changelogs, and marketing pages. Extract a structured feature list using AI analysis.

Step 3: Codebase Mapping

For each competitor feature, check: does your codebase implement equivalent functionality? This isn't keyword matching — it's structural analysis of your feature clusters against the competitor's described capabilities.

Step 4: Gap Scoring

For features you don't have: how hard would they be to build? Based on your codebase's architecture, which files would need to change? Which teams would be involved? What dependencies exist?

Why This Matters

For Product Teams

Data-driven prioritization. Instead of "we should build SSO because competitors have it," you get: "Competitors A, B, and C all have SSO. Implementation in our codebase requires changes to auth (14 files), user management (8 files), and admin (5 files). Estimated complexity: High. Dependencies: billing integration needs to support per-seat SSO pricing."

For Engineering Leaders

Resource planning based on actual complexity, not PM estimates. "The top 5 competitive gaps would require approximately 3 engineers for 2 months, primarily affecting the auth and billing feature clusters."

For Executives

Board-level competitive positioning with real data. "We cover 73% of our primary competitor's feature set. The 27% gap is concentrated in enterprise features (SSO, SCIM, audit logging) which aligns with our enterprise expansion roadmap."

Competitive intelligence that's derived from code analysis can't be argued with. It's not opinion — it's structural analysis.

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Originally published on glue.tools. Glue is the pre-code intelligence platform — paste a ticket, get a battle plan.