Someone draws a two by two on a whiteboard. Everyone stares at it. Then the room fills it in from memory, which is to say from vibes, which is to say from whatever the loudest person believes about the market.
Four hours later you have a positioning map that is really a group opinion with axes drawn on it.
The template was never the hard part. Getting real numbers into it was the hard part, and that is the bit the workshop quietly skips.
So we build eleven of them from the week's actual data instead.
Gap analysis, ranked by where the distance between you and them is widest. Share of AI answers, per question and per engine. Voice of Customer, from their own reviewers. Positioning map. Price architecture, tier by tier, showing where their entry point really sits. Category entry points, the moments buyers go looking and who owns each one. A value curve showing what the category competes on and where they deliberately do less. A citation authority map of the domains answer engines read before answering. A claim ladder, ordering their claims from provable to decorative. A creative testing matrix of which ad angles they keep paying for. And a journey view.
They are generated, not written. Which matters more than it sounds, because it means nobody is quietly rounding a number to make a cell look tidier.
Every cell links back to the source number it came from. Click it, see the measurement, see the date. If you disagree, you can disagree with the actual data rather than with a consultant's memory of it.
That link is the whole reason to trust the thing. A framework is a way of arranging facts. If you cannot check the facts, you have arranged something else.
They also rebuild every run from the same snapshots as the report, so the positioning map does not slowly become historical fiction while sitting in a slide deck. Which, again, is what happens to the whiteboard version. It is accurate on the day and quietly wrong by March.
Here is what I would not claim. A framework does not make the decision. The value curve will show you that the category competes on four things and your competitor has deliberately abandoned one of them. Whether abandoning it was brilliant or stupid is a judgement, and it is yours. We fill in the grid. You still have to look at it and think.
One thing to do next: find the last strategy deck your company made and check one number in it against reality.
If it is still true, you have a good process. If it is not, you have a workshop problem.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.