Run Porters Five Forces

---
name: run-porters-five-forces
description: Use when a strategist needs to understand the competitive dynamics of an industry before setting market positioning. Triggers on "run Porter's Five Forces", "I need to understand the competitive landscape", "map industry attractiveness", "how competitive is this market", "supplier and buyer power analysis". Produces a committed competitive-landscape artifact. Do NOT use for individual competitor profiling — this is an industry-structure analysis, not a competitor teardown.
---

# Skill: run-porters-five-forces

Produces a **competitive landscape analysis** using Porter's Five Forces framework — the structural forces that determine industry attractiveness and competitive pressure. The five forces are: Supplier Power, Buyer Power, Threat of New Entrants, Threat of Substitutes, and Competitive Rivalry. References Porter's framework by name; see `references/agentbundle-layout.md` for artifact path.

## Output rendering

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Lead with the useful outcome or next action. Use warm, non-blaming language and everyday words. Define an unfamiliar term in a few plain words before naming it; keep proper names and exact technical terms intact.
During tool work, do not narrate routine calls. Send an update only for safety, a blocker, a needed decision, a material scope change, a long wait, or an active host requirement.
When requesting input, ask only for what is needed now. Ask dependent questions one at a time; otherwise group related questions. Offer no more than three clear choices when choices help.
Shape the answer to the facts: one fact needs one sentence; related facts use prose; separate items use bullets; real sequences use numbered steps.
For prose artifacts, use descriptive headings, short resumable sections, one fact per sentence, and no repeated summary. Emphasize at most one load-bearing point per section. Group long inventories instead of truncating them.
Make the result stand alone. Do needed arithmetic, give real dates or times, and say what a file or link establishes instead of making the reader inspect it.
For code and comments, prefer obvious structure and names. Comment on intent, constraints, or trade-offs that the code cannot state clearly.
Use a table, tree, flow, or other visual only when it makes a relationship materially easier to understand.
Report the current state, not the path taken. Omit dead ends, resolved trade-offs, hedges, and advice the user did not request.
When editing maintained prose, consolidate repeated rules and navigation before adding another caveat.
Silence and brevity never reduce the work, checks, or requested coverage. Preserve depth, evidence, constraints, warnings, code, diffs, errors, and exact names, paths, and counts.
Keep verification compact: pass or fail, count, and runtime. Name a suite when it failed or when the name changes what the reader should do.
Before sending, check that the reader can act without counting, converting, opening a file, or asking what a line means.
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Table — When presenting several items that share the same fields, render a Markdown table. Cap at ~5 columns; beyond that, switch to a per-item detail list. Right-align numeric columns.

## When to invoke

1. **An industry boundary is nameable** — the analysis requires a defined market (e.g., "B2B HR software", "direct-to-consumer meal kits"); without it, the forces cannot be assessed.
2. **You are evaluating market entry or repositioning** — Five Forces is an entry/positioning tool, not an operational one.
3. **No current Five Forces analysis exists for this industry** — amend rather than duplicate.

## Procedure

1. **Establish the industry boundary.** Name the industry, the geographic scope, and the time horizon. A market that is too broad (e.g., "software") produces meaningless force ratings; one that is too narrow misses the actual competitive dynamics.
2. **Assess Supplier Power.** Who supplies the critical inputs (technology, talent, data, components)? Rate concentration, switching cost, and supplier ability to forward-integrate. Elicit at least one concrete example.
3. **Assess Buyer Power.** Who buys and how much leverage do they have? Rate buyer concentration, price sensitivity, standardization of the offering, and backward-integration threat.
4. **Assess Threat of New Entrants.** What barriers protect the incumbents? Rate capital requirements, economies of scale, regulation, switching costs, and brand loyalty. Name the most credible near-term entrant type.
5. **Assess Threat of Substitutes.** What alternative solutions — not direct competitors, but different approaches to the same job — could attract buyers away? Rate switching cost to the substitute and the performance trajectory of the substitute.
6. **Assess Competitive Rivalry.** How intense is competition among existing players? Rate concentration, market growth rate, product differentiation, and exit barriers.
7. **Synthesize industry attractiveness.** Rate overall industry attractiveness (high / medium / low) from the force profile. Name the one or two forces that most determine strategic position, and derive the top strategic implication for market entry or repositioning.
8. **Resolve the artifact path** following `references/agentbundle-layout.md`. Surface the path, then commit `competitive-landscape.md` with frontmatter `type: competitive-landscape`.

## Anti-patterns

- **Individual competitor profiling in a Forces analysis.** Rivalry assessment names the competitive dynamic, not a competitor teardown; detailed competitor profiles are separate artifacts.
- **Force ratings without evidence.** Each force requires at least one observable fact — a named supplier, a measured churn rate, a regulatory threshold. "High rivalry because the market is competitive" is circular.
- **Static analysis in dynamic markets.** Label the time horizon and flag forces that are likely to shift. A Five Forces snapshot taken today may be wrong in 18 months.