← The Research Station ~ dish 02 of 10 · the research station

Competitor Surveillance

The Chef's habit problem isn't the station misses competitive moves. It's we never wrote down what "actionable" means in our market. Without that definition, the station produces a wall of facts and the team learns to ignore it.

The job

The leadership team wants to know what competitors are doing. Pricing changes. New product launches. Expansion moves. Hiring signals. Right now that tracking is ad-hoc. Someone notices a competitor’s site looks different and mentions it in a meeting. A new hire hears that a competitor is in town and brings it up. A customer mentions a competitor’s lower price.

When the station runs this dish well, a weekly surveillance report lands on the Chef’s desk. Each named competitor. The moves that happened this week. Whether they signal a major shift or a minor move. What the Chef should know. What the Chef should do. The report tells the Chef what changed and why it matters.

The difference between a report that gets acted on and one that gets filed is knowing what actionable means. A competitor site redesign might or might not matter. A pricing move matters only if the price matters to your customers. New hiring matters only if the role signals a capability you care about. Without a clear definition, every signal looks the same and the Chef stops trusting the report.

The recipe

All seven ingredients still apply. The leverage on this dish is Measurement (Ingredient #6). Define what “actionable” means for your business before deployment. A price change above X percent. A job posting in role Y. A product launch in segment Z. Without that metric, you get facts without decisions.

Context matters. The station knows which competitors to watch and which competitor moves matter to your business. Examples matter. Show the station a surveillance report you’d actually act on. What format. How much detail. Guardrails matter. Some competitor data is rumor-sourced. Stick to public, verifiable information.

How to build it

  1. List your three to five direct competitors. The ones that matter. The ones your sales team actually loses to.
  2. Define what “actionable” means for each competitor dimension. Price: what percent change would shift your positioning. Product: what new category would signal a threat. Geography: what new region would signal expansion. Hiring: what role would signal a capability shift. Write these definitions down.
  3. Set up monitoring for each competitor’s website, pricing page, job board, LinkedIn company page, news mentions. These are the public, verifiable sources.
  4. Pull one surveillance report you’d actually read and would change a Monday decision based on. That’s your template.
  5. Define the update cadence. Weekly is the default. If competitors move daily, maybe it’s more. If the category moves slowly, weekly is enough.
  6. Test on a mock run. Have the station scan three of your competitors’ sites and job boards for the last 30 days. Flag the moves that hit your “actionable” threshold. You read it. Are these the moves you care about. Adjust the threshold.
  7. Go live. Read every report. If a report includes moves that don’t match your threshold, tighten. If you miss moves that should have been flagged, broaden.

What breaks it

  • Threshold is too low. Every new job posting flags as a move. The report includes a competitor’s website CSS change because it’s technically a change. You read the first report and ignore the rest because the signal is too weak. Raise the threshold. A new job posting in a role nobody’s hired before is signal. A standard headcount replacement is noise.
  • Sourcing includes rumor. A sales rep heard from a customer that a competitor is launching a new product. The station includes it in the report. The product never launches. The report lost credibility. Stick to public, verifiable sources only. Websites, news, job boards, financial filings. Never third-party rumor.
  • Pricing intel is stale. The report says competitor X raised prices 10 percent. You read it and investigate. They raised prices three weeks ago and you’re just hearing about it. Get the cadence right. Price changes need to be caught within a day or two of publication, not a week later.
  • The report never connects moves to strategy. It lists facts. Competitor hired three salespeople. Competitor launched a new product category. Competitor opened a new office. None of those facts has context. Why did they hire salespeople. What threat does that product pose. Is that office a beachhead into a new market. The report is just a fact list.
  • Feedback loop death. The Chef reads a surveillance report and thinks “that pricing move is interesting but not a threat.” The Chef never tells the station. The next report flags the same move as significant because the context died.

When it’s working

At week four, the surveillance report surfaces three to five competitor moves a week. Eighty percent of them are actually actionable by your definition. The Chef reads the report every time. When a significant move happens, the Chef sees it within a day or two. Strategic decisions change because the surveillance intel informed them.

The signal that the recipe is sharp: the Chef references a competitor move the station surfaced when explaining a strategic decision.

Monday Move

List your three to five direct competitors. Define what “actionable” means for each (price above X percent, product in Y category, hiring in Z role). Set up monitoring on their websites, pricing pages, and job boards. Write one surveillance report by hand. The station is running on Monday.

Dish 2 of 10 on the Research Station. Build-note leverage: Measurement (Ingredient #6).