Practical guide

How to create a competitive intelligence digest

Build the digest around competitor hypotheses and observable evidence. Separate company claims from independent signals, merge announcement rewrites, and state how each item changes the hypothesis.[1][2]

Why this gets difficult

Competitive-intelligence feeds overcount press releases, social reactions, and copied product announcements while underweighting filings, documentation, hiring, customer evidence, and actual operating changes.[1][2]

A practical way through

  1. Define the competitors, markets, products, and questions the monitoring program is meant to answer.[1][2]
  2. Collect first-party filings, documentation, releases, job postings, and other observable changes.[1][2]
  3. Group secondary coverage under the company event it discusses and label unsupported inference.[1][2]
  4. Tag selected items as confirm, weaken, or leave unchanged for the relevant competitive hypothesis.[1][2]

An example

The situation: A competitor announces an enterprise push and the news cycle repeats the claim before customer or operating evidence appears.[1][2]

What changes: The announcement remains a stated strategy, documentation and hiring changes are tracked as observable signals, and commentary is separated from proof.[1][2]

What you get: The reader sees an early hypothesis with evidence to watch instead of a conclusion disguised as news volume.[1][2]

What to watch for

  • Public evidence cannot reveal private roadmap, pipeline, pricing concessions, or customer retention.[1][2]
  • Hiring and product signals are ambiguous unless several independent observations point in the same direction.[1][2]

Sources worth keeping

  • Company filings, product documentation, and official announcements.[1][2]
  • Independent customer, talent, and market evidence.[1][2]
  • Specialist analysis that labels inference and states what would disprove it.[1][2]

How Scottie helps

Scottie can combine selected company, filing, trade, and market sources into a hypothesis-aware brief while retaining the reviewed evidence behind every item.[3]

Related reading

Sources and official links

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