Pretend you are the competitor so you hear the counter-move before the market does.
Most strategy reviews protect the home team. The competitor seat does the opposite. It asks what the cheapest response is, which customers are easiest to peel, which claim is easiest to undercut, and which narrative will travel if your launch or price change becomes public tomorrow.
This is one of the core moves in a serious war game: after you think about what great looks like, seat the enemy and make them try to break it. The output you want is not a performance. It is a short list of material counters, the evidence each needs, and the mitigations that would survive them.
How to cast the seat
Name a real rival or a composite. Give them a goal: win the deal, stall your launch, hire your people, or reframe the category. Give them constraints: budget, brand risk, and time. Without constraints the seat becomes cartoonish. With constraints it produces moves you might actually see.
Write the seat into the prompt as a named role with a mandate. Example: "Competitor: describe the cheapest counter within thirty days, the message that undercuts our wedge, and the segment you would target first. Stay inside a realistic budget and avoid illegal tactics."
What to demand from the pass
- The cheapest counter within thirty days.
- The message that would make your strongest claim look weak.
- The customer segment they would target first.
- The fact about your plan they would leak or highlight.
- What would make them ignore you instead.
When the decision is a pricing change, launch, or fundraising narrative, run the competitor seat last among the attack passes so it can use earlier objections as ammunition. Competitors do not invent your weaknesses from nothing. They amplify the soft joints your own team already half-knows. Make the seat quote your pack back at you.
Run that brief in Pingpong against your real package. Follow with a home-team response pass so you leave with mitigations, not only fear. Pair with role-play strategy review, war-game your strategy, pretend you are the buyer, war-game a product launch, and red-team your decision. See multi-perspective strategy review and how to run a Pingpong.