The first decision is the one people get wrong most often, and getting it wrong throws off everything downstream.
Your competitive alternative usually isn't another vendor. It's a spreadsheet someone maintains. An internal tool built by an engineer who has since left. A manual process nobody loves. Most often, doing nothing and living with the problem.
Write those down even when they're unflattering. "They keep using the spreadsheet" is a real answer, and it tells you your actual job is beating inertia rather than beating a competitor.
Then list every capability the alternatives lack. Go long first, twenty items is fine. Turn each into value by asking "so what?" until you reach something a buyer cares about. Real-time sync becomes your team stops arguing over stale numbers becomes your Monday meeting gets shorter. Somewhere in that chain is the sentence worth keeping.
Pick your category last
This is the highest-leverage decision in the exercise and the one everyone reaches for first, because it's the fun one.
Category is the frame that makes your value obvious. Get it right and your strengths look inevitable. Get it wrong and you spend every sales call explaining why the usual comparison doesn't apply.
You can't choose it well until the other four are settled, because the right category is the one that puts your specific value at the centre. Choose early and you lock yourself into a frame built around whichever strength you happened to think of first.
When all five are done, write it as one page. Not a slogan. A document your team can argue with, because they will, and the arguing is where it gets good.
