Practical guide

Build a competitive intelligence reading workflow

Start with observable competitive questions. Monitor first-party changes and independent market signals, group press-release rewrites, label inference, and connect every selected item to a thesis or decision.[1][2]

Why this gets difficult

Competitive monitoring often becomes a collection of announcements and mentions without a hypothesis, making attention track competitor publicity rather than meaningful evidence.[1][2]

A practical way through

  1. Write the competitor hypotheses, markets, products, and customer questions under active review.[1][2]
  2. Collect filings, documentation, releases, pricing, hiring, and customer evidence separately.[1][2]
  3. Group secondary coverage beneath the underlying competitor event.[1][2]
  4. Mark evidence as confirming, weakening, or leaving the hypothesis unchanged.[1][2]

An example

The situation: A competitor announces an enterprise strategy and dozens of outlets repeat the statement before customer evidence appears.[1][2]

What changes: The announcement remains a stated intention, while documentation, hiring, and customer observations are tracked as separate evidence.[1][2]

What you get: The team gains a testable watchlist instead of treating announcement volume as execution proof.[1][2]

What to watch for

  • Public signals cannot reveal private roadmap, pipeline, customer retention, or pricing concessions.[1][2]
  • Hiring and product changes are ambiguous unless several independent observations align.[1][2]

Sources worth keeping

  • Company filings, documentation, pricing, and official releases.[1][2]
  • Independent customer and market evidence.[1][2]
  • Analysts who label inference and state what would disprove the thesis.[1][2]

How Scottie helps

Scottie can rank chosen competitor and market sources against explicit hypotheses, combine repeated coverage, and preserve the reviewed original links.[3]

Related reading

Sources and official links

One brief, your sources

Want the morning brief without the morning scroll?

Start with 14 days free. Keep the founding rate of $15 a month if Scottie earns a place in your morning.

Try Scottie free