Your Competitors' Customers Are Writing Your Roadmap. Deck Helps You Leverage It

Find opportunities to improve your product based on your competitors' customer feedback, in minutes instead of weeks.

Matt Teixeira

3 minutes read

Somewhere in your competitors' reviews is a list of opportunities you haven't seen yet. Their customers write it every day on review sites, forums and social channels. They tell the world what frustrates them, what they wish existed and what they genuinely love.

Most product teams never read it. Not because they don't care, but because doing it properly takes weeks.

Today we're launching Competitor Intelligence in Deck. Find opportunities to improve your product based on your competitors' customer feedback, in minutes instead of weeks.

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Competitor Intelligence in Deck

The Research No Product Manager Has Time For

Ask any product manager whether competitor research matters and they'll say yes. Ask when they last did it properly and you'll get a pause.

Gathering a competitor's customer feedback means hunting through review sites and communities, copying quotes into a spreadsheet, tagging themes by hand, and then turning it all into a report the team can act on. For one competitor, that's a week. For five, it's, well 5 weeks + synthesis.

So it gets skipped. It's a small slice of the job, avoided simply because of the time and effort involved. And the cost compounds. You miss problems you could have solved for your own customers, and you miss the chance to win over people who are actively frustrated with the product they use today.

How It Works

  1. Add competitors, suggested or your own
  2. Deck agents research public customer reviews
  3. SWOT-style, always-on report
  4. Promote to Opportunity Backlog
  5. Initiatives & Projects

Check-ins (weekly, monthly or quarterly) send the agents back to step 2.

Open Competitors in Deck and either pick from suggested competitors or add your own. Deck's AI agents then scour publicly available sources for what those competitors' customers are saying, aggregate it, and merge new quotes into your existing competitor graph.

The result is a SWOT-style report that is always on, built entirely from the voice of their customers:

WeaknessesOpportunitiesDelights
Where their customers are frustratedNeeds their customers keep asking for that nobody is solvingWhat their customers love and talk about
Your chance to do it betterYour chance to build it firstThe bar you need to clear

One competitor's report: what customers like, what frustrates them, and your openings

From Insight to Roadmap

Insights only matter if they change what you build. Any subtheme or opportunity in the report can be promoted straight into your Opportunity Backlog. Deck can match it against your own customer feedback, so you see whether your customers feel the same pain.

Promote an opportunity and research it with your own customer feedback

From there, carry it into Initiatives and Projects, then hand it over to your agents to build. Build on their weaknesses. Learn from their strengths and build something better.

Self-Driving with Check-Ins

Markets move. Competitors ship, break things and ship again. Turn on periodic check-ins, weekly, monthly or quarterly, and Deck refreshes the report as new public reviews appear. No manual research sprint required.

Each check-in reports what changed since the last one

Built for Your Agents, Too

Anything you can do in the UI, your agents can do. Competitor Intelligence is available in the Deck API and MCP, with skills. Use explore_competitors to read the report, and mutate_competitors to start research, add competitors, promote opportunities and set check-ins. It's also available in the Deck plugin for frontier model apps.

An agent reading the Competitors report through the Deck MCP

A small confession from behind the scenes: this is the first feature our own team used more through MCP than through the UI. Asking an agent what a competitor's customers complained about most this month, and getting a sourced answer back, changes how often you actually ask.

It's Still About Customers

One thing we were careful about while building this: Competitor Intelligence isn't about obsessing over competitors. It's about customers, theirs and yours. The best signal for what to build next is still what real people say about the products they use. Now you can hear from a lot more of them.

Get Started

Open Competitors in Deck, pick a suggested competitor or add your own, and see what their customers have been trying to tell you.