Blog
Competitive intelligence insights
Strategy, signals, and the craft of positioning — from the team building the platform.
Signals
The Position, Episode 17: The Same Three Sources
If every team in your category is reading the same inputs, you don't have competitive intelligence — you have a shared opinion. A framework for auditing your source diversity.
9 October 2026
The Position · Edition 16
Selling What's Coming: Giving Sales Roadmap Visibility Without the Risk
A battlecard defends today; it can't sell your trajectory. The three-tier roadmap share gives reps a credible future to pitch — without overpromising.
2 October 2026
The Position · Edition 15
Write Once, Read Never: Storage vs. a Real Intelligence Corpus
Most competitive intel isn't missing — it's been read exactly once. The difference between storage and a corpus is whether patterns surface without anyone going looking.
25 September 2026
The Theory · Episode 6
The War of Attrition: Surviving a Price War Nobody Can Afford
When the reputation play fails, both sides burn cash waiting for the other to blink. The endurance audit — and why the winner is the side with better information, not the better product.
22 September 2026
The Position · Edition 14
Is Your Feedback a Two-Way Street? Closing the Loop With Customers
Feedback doesn't stop because clients run out of things to say — it stops because nothing comes back. The Loop Ledger: four steps to closing the loop, including the noes.
18 September 2026
The Theory · Episode 5
The Chain Store Game: Is That Competitor Discount a Fight or a Bluff?
A 45% discount on a small deal isn't about the deal — it's reputation bought to deter you. Selten's game, and the four-step read that separates a real fight from a bluff.
15 September 2026
The Position · Edition 13
Your Sales Team Already Did the Market Research — They Have Nowhere to Put It
Every week, sales hears the freshest market signal in the business — objections, lost deals, competitor mentions. Almost all of it evaporates. The signal-to-roadmap loop fixes it.
11 September 2026
The Theory · Episode 4
The Silent Truce: The Game Theory Behind Stable SaaS Pricing
Two near-identical products can hold prices 30% apart for years — a coordination equilibrium, not collusion. The focal-point audit to run before touching your pricing page.
8 September 2026
The Position · Edition 12
The Moat Is Not the Castle: Features vs. Defensibility on the Roadmap
'What should we build next' and 'what makes us hard to copy' are different questions — and most roadmap meetings only ask the first. The two-question check for every item.
4 September 2026
The Theory · Episode 3
The Stag Hunt: When to Bet Your Roadmap on a Category Shift
A category-defining bet only pays off if the market moves with you. The break-even formula — and why estimating 'p' requires continuous competitor intelligence, not a snapshot.
1 September 2026
The Position · Edition 11
Opportunity Has a Shelf Life: Why Your SWOT Analysis Is Already Stale
A SWOT built in January can be wrong by March. Quadrants decay on a schedule nobody watches — here's the shelf-life audit to run before your next strategy review.
28 August 2026
The Theory · Episode 2
The Prisoner's Dilemma You're Already Losing: Automate Competitive Intelligence or Fall Behind
Automating CI is a dominant strategy regardless of what your competitor does — and because the game is iterated, the advantage compounds every quarter you wait.
25 August 2026
The Position · Edition 10
13 Weeks: What a Product Manager Gets Back When Agents Do the Research
A $180K PM spends two-thirds of the year on research and reporting. Running the numbers: 516 hours — a full quarter — reclaimed per PM, per year.
21 August 2026
The Theory · Episode 1
War Gaming Your Product Roadmap: Plan Like You're Playing an Opponent
Most roadmap planning is single-player — but competitors get to move too. The three-move roadmap check: your move, their most credible response, your answer to it.
18 August 2026
The Position · Edition 8
The Consultant and the Vendor Are Reading the Same Market — Backwards
Consultants recommending software and vendors trying to win deals run the same three-question analysis from opposite sides. Whoever builds it sharper wins the moment.
31 July 2026
The Position · Edition 7
Collaboration Isn't a Value Statement — It's a Revenue Strategy
Product, Sales, Marketing and the customer as a single loop is the mechanism behind higher win rates and faster ramp — not a poster on the wall. Here's the loop, and how to measure it.
24 July 2026
The Position · Edition 6
AI Can Inform Your Next Price — It Shouldn't Set It
Suggestion and automation are not the same feature with different marketing. Three questions to ask before trusting any agentic pricing or roadmap recommendation.
17 July 2026
The Position · Edition 5
Competitive Intelligence ROI: The Question Nobody Answers With a Number
CI doesn't survive budget reviews on 'it helps us stay informed.' The ROI shows up in three measurable places: pricing, win rates, and engineering hours on the wrong features.
10 July 2026
Battlecards
Your battlecard is lying to you — and you don’t know it yet
Most battlecards are written in a sprint and never touched again — while the competitor ships three releases. The decay problem destroying win rates, and the living battlecard framework that fixes it.
6 July 2026
Strategy
Why your CI analyst is your most important hire for 2026 — and why most companies can’t afford one
Someone has to own the competitive intelligence layer — the monitoring, the battlecards, the win-loss patterns. Why that hire tops the list for 2026, and what to do when the budget says no.
6 July 2026
Win-Loss
The Win-Loss Debrief Template Your Sales Team Will Actually Use
Win-loss debriefs fail because they're too long. The five-question template reps actually complete — and how the answers aggregate into roadmap-grade competitive intelligence.
6 July 2026
Signals
Five competitive signals hiding in your CRM right now
Your deal data is a goldmine nobody's reading. The five CRM fields containing the richest competitive signal — and what to do with each of them.
6 July 2026
The Position · Edition 4
Stop Swinging a Sledgehammer at a Thumbtack: Right-Sizing AI Models
Running every agent task through a frontier model isn't rigour — it's a hammer billed at hammer prices. A three-question framework for matching the model to the job.
3 July 2026
The Position · Edition 3
The Roadmap Intelligence Gap: Why Competitive Signals Never Reach Product
Competitive signal reaches Product as anecdote, months late — if at all. The roadmap intelligence gap is a structural flaw that quietly leaks revenue every quarter.
26 June 2026
The Position · Edition 2
The Product Roadmap Mistake That Costs You Deals
Most roadmaps are built from customer requests and internal conviction — not revenue data. Revenue-linked roadmapping connects the deals you're losing to the features you should build.
19 June 2026
The Position · Edition 1
The Four-Way Mirror: Why Product, Sales and Marketing Drift Apart
Ask Product, Sales, Marketing and a customer why you're winning or losing deals and you'll get four different answers. The four-way mirror explains why — and what actually fixes cross-functional drift.
12 June 2026