The problem
Competitive analysis always starts at a whiteboard. You draw a 2x2 with the axes that matter for your market — price vs. capability, enterprise vs. SMB, breadth vs. depth. You place competitors as dots. You argue about where your own dot belongs. The spatial layout of the map reveals things a spreadsheet doesn't: who's crowded, where the white space is, who's positioned directly against you vs. who's in an adjacent space.
Then you try to turn the whiteboard into a deliverable. A slide deck, a one-pager for the board, a wiki page for the team. The 2x2 becomes a bullet list. The spatial relationships become 'Company A is better at X but weaker at Y.' The insight gets stripped out in the translation.
Competitive analysis documents are also quickly stale. A competitor ships a new feature, a new player enters the market, and your 90-day-old doc is wrong. The team needs to update the map, not rewrite the doc from scratch.