Read a competitor's announcement for what it does to you

A workflow that turns a competitor's news into the effect on your position, the opening it leaves, and the briefing you would give a leadership team.

The problem

A competitor ships something and the internal conversation is about whether it is impressive. The useful questions are narrower: what does it change about our position, is there an opening, and what does leadership need to decide.

The workflow

  1. 1

    Show the Business Impact

    Establish what the move does to your market, your customers and your costs before anyone reaches for an opinion.

  2. 2

    Find the Opportunity

    Look for what the move leaves open. A competitor committing to something is also a competitor not doing other things.

  3. 3

    CEO Briefing: Decide in 90 Days

    Compress both into the form a leadership team can act on, with the decision named.

What you put in

A competitor's press release, product announcement, funding news or earnings coverage.

What you get back

The last step answers under these headings. They are read from CEO Briefing: Decide in 90 Days itself, so this list changes when the template does — it is not a transcript of a run.

Setting it up

  1. Open the workflow builder and start a new workflow.
  2. Add the three templates above as steps, in that order.
  3. Fill in your industry and what your company does on the profile page — the first two steps read it, and without it they answer in general terms.
  4. Save it, and run it whenever a competitor announcement lands.
Build this workflow Or start from one that exists

If it does not work

The briefing reads like a press summary.

The last step can only compress what the first two found. If the article was an announcement with no substance behind it, that is the honest result — and worth knowing before a meeting is called about it.

It keeps naming opportunities that are not ours to take.

The opportunity step reads your work focus areas from your profile. Narrowing those narrows what it proposes.

Other recipes

News triage workflow A three-step workflow that tells you what a story actually is, whether it touches you, and what to do about it — so a long article becomes a yes or a no. Regulation monitoring workflow A workflow that reads policy and legal news for what it obliges you to do, by when, and who inside the organisation owns it. Multi-model analysis workflow A workflow that runs the same question through more than one provider and then has a third step look at where the two disagree. Cheap model first workflow A workflow that screens with a small fast model and only sends what survives to a large one, so most articles never reach the expensive step. Executive briefing workflow A workflow that reads a story from three seats at once — chief executive, finance, and the board — so the briefing already answers the questions each of them will ask. Document review workflow A workflow for contracts, proposals and reports: the obligations it creates, and then an adversarial pass over what it is quietly not saying. Client news monitoring workflow A workflow for people who advise: what a story means for the client, whether it is a problem, and whether it is a reason to call.