Who This Helps
Product Managers drowning in manual slide updates for leadership reviews. If you're spending hours each week copying competitor features into a spreadsheet for your Strategy Basics: Competitive Map course, this is for you. Let the robots do the boring stuff.
Mini Case
Sam's team tracked 8 competitors across 15 features. Every Thursday, she'd spend 3 hours updating slides before the product sync. After automating, those updates happen in 20 minutes. She caught a key pricing change from a rival 5 days sooner. That's a 90% time save you can use for actual strategy.
Do This Now (5 Steps)
- List your top 5 competitive intelligence sources (news, review sites, their blogs).
- Pick one metric from your competitive map to track automatically, like feature releases.
- Set a weekly 15-minute calendar block to review automated findings.
- Create a simple shared doc (Google Sheet, Notion) for the live feed.
- Share one fresh insight in your next team chat to show it's working.
Avoid These Traps
- Don't try to automate everything at once. Start with one competitor or one data point.
- Avoid analysis paralysis. The goal is faster insight, not a perfect data warehouse.
- Don't let the tool run silently. Schedule that weekly review to actually use the info.
- Skipping the human sense-check. AI might miss nuance—glance at the raw headlines.
- Forgetting to connect insights to decisions. Ask "So what should we do differently?"
Your Win by Friday
By this Friday, you'll have one piece of competitive intelligence you didn't have to manually dig for. You'll free up at least one hour you used to spend on manual updates. You'll walk into your next meeting with a genuinely recent data point. Go enjoy that coffee while the system works for you.