Most competitor slides are logo soups — a grid of names with no axes and no argument. An investment committee doesn't want to know who exists; it wants to know where the whitespace is, who you'd actually collide with, and why not just keep doing it the old way. A map that answers those survives the room. Here's how to build one deterministically, so the same players always land in the same place.
A 2×2 only means something if the two axes capture a real tension. Pick from a fixed vocabulary so the map is comparable across sectors:
The classic pairing is capability × scale: it separates "great product, small footprint" from "big footprint, ageing product," which is exactly the whitespace a new entrant argues for.
Every score is analyst-assigned from public evidence — disclosed funding, install-base statements in filings, product docs — and carries a citation slot. A player mapped without a source doesn't ship. Players above the 50 midpoint on an axis are "high"; below, "low." That splits the map into four quadrants:
A composite rank (the mean of a player's provided scores) gives the "who to watch" ordering underneath the map — deterministic, so it's reproducible.
This is the row that separates a real map from a logo soup. Every committee asks the same question: "why not just keep doing it the old way?" So the framework requires a "status quo / do-nothing / DIY" entry — manual process, incumbent conveyor, in-house spreadsheet — sized like any other competitor.
If the status-quo row is missing, the engine raises a warning and the map isn't considered complete. Half of all deals lose to "do nothing," and a map that pretends otherwise gets torn apart in the room.
Every commissioned report includes a two-axis positioning map with the mandatory status-quo row and a cited attribute table.
See it in the sample → Commission a cited report