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Skill reference: competitive-quadrant

Skill reference: competitive-quadrant

Section titled “Skill reference: competitive-quadrant”

The competitive-quadrant skill authors one document genre: a two-axis competitive-quadrant report — a practitioner deliverable that scores every included vendor or offering in a defined market on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute, and places each into exactly one of four quadrants. This reference describes what that document type is, how the skill produces one, when it earns its place, and the provenance behind it.

PropertyValue
AuthorsA two-axis competitive-quadrant report
Purpose groupResearch & market intelligence
MIF conceptTypesemantic
Target MIF level3
Primary sourceGeneric two-axis competitive-analysis convention (Completeness of Vision × Ability to Execute) — explicitly not Gartner’s Magic Quadrant methodology or trademark

What this document type is

Section titled “What this document type is”

A competitive-quadrant report scores every vendor or offering in a defined market on two evaluation axes — Completeness of Vision (x) and Ability to Execute (y) — and places each into exactly one of four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, Niche Players. Its defining trait is the quadrant placement itself, backed by explicit inclusion criteria stating which vendors qualify, per-axis scoring traced to cited sources, and a per-vendor Strengths and Cautions pair. A required Mermaid quadrantChart figure renders the two-axis placement; the genre also covers Context & Market Overview and a Methodology section documenting how evidence was gathered and the assessment’s as-of date and limits. It captures declarative comparative-judgment knowledge, not a time-bound event or a step-by-step procedure.

This genre reproduces only a generic two-axis competitive-analysis structure. It is not a Gartner Magic Quadrant and must never claim to be one, imply Gartner endorsement, or use “Magic Quadrant” as a conformance or branding claim — “Magic Quadrant” is a Gartner trademark and a proprietary methodology, and the caveat is load-bearing enough that every report this genre produces states it explicitly.

How the skill produces one

Section titled “How the skill produces one”

competitive-quadrant is a genre skill: it carries the two-axis quadrant pattern as durable instructions plus exemplars, and writes the artifact over a MIF floor so the result is at once a human-readable report and a machine-conformant unit.

  • Pattern, made operational. The skill encodes Market Definition / Inclusion Criteria, the two-axis evaluation framework, per-vendor profiles, quadrant placement, Context & Market Overview, and Methodology, and treats the Mermaid quadrantChart figure as mandatory — a placement without it is not conformant. It requires exhaustive coverage of every vendor meeting the inclusion criteria and traces every axis score, Strength, and Caution to a cited source.
  • Exemplars set the bar. Like every genre in the suite it ships good-l1.md (the MIF Level-1 floor), good.md (the Level-3 target), bad.md (a counter-example that places vendors with no quadrant figure at all), and evals/evals.json. The check-exemplars gate proves good-l1.md validates at L1 and good.md at Level 3.
  • MIF projection. The document is authored with MIF frontmatter (via the shared mif-frontmatter substrate) and a conceptType of semantic. mif-validate proves the Markdown ↔ JSON-LD round-trip is lossless.

When it is beneficial

Section titled “When it is beneficial”

Reach for competitive-quadrant when the deliverable must rank vendors or offerings in a defined market on two evaluation axes and force each into one quadrant — inclusion criteria, cited axis scores, and the required figure are the artifact’s reason to exist.

Do not use it for a narrative survey of a market’s size, segments, growth, and trends with no forced two-axis placement of named vendors — that broader, descriptive genre does not require every entrant to land in exactly one of four quadrants. Do not use it for a single evaluation with a free-form comparison table and no fixed two-axis quadrant shape — that is engineering: its Trade-offs table maps options against decision drivers, but never forces a Completeness-of-Vision-by-Ability-to- Execute placement. Do not use it for an informal, one-design narrative weighing alternatives before building something — that is google-design-doc, not a vendor-comparison genre.

Example

Section titled “Example”

A report titled “Competitive Quadrant: Full Lifecycle API Gateway Platforms” opens with the caveat that it is a generic two-axis analysis, not a Gartner Magic Quadrant, then states its inclusion criteria (a request-routing data plane plus a separate management plane, general availability, and public documentation). Five vendors qualify: Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Tyk, and Gravitee. Each is scored on Completeness of Vision (lifecycle breadth, deployment openness) and Ability to Execute (production-readiness, ecosystem depth, operational simplicity), given a Strengths/Cautions profile, and placed on a Mermaid quadrantChart: Kong and Apigee land in Leaders, AWS API Gateway in Challengers, and Tyk and Gravitee in Niche Players, with no vendor placed in Visionaries this cycle. A Context & Market Overview explains the market’s bifurcation between lifecycle incumbents and single-cloud managed offerings, and the Methodology section states the as-of date, that no claim was independently benchmarked, and that pricing was out of scope.

Provenance & citations

Section titled “Provenance & citations”