You track two to five competitors. Somewhere in your inbox, Slack, and browser history is the week's worth of things they said, shipped, or hinted. If you had to write a one-page memo on 'what did they do this week and what should we do about it', you probably could — but you don't, because it takes an hour and by Friday you're tired. This workflow gets it to 25 minutes end-to-end, produced as a memo your team will read Monday morning without you sending a follow-up nag.
Collect the week's inputs
Goal: Get every scrap of competitor activity from the last 7 days into one place.
I want to build a weekly competitive digest for [Company X, Company Y, Company Z]. Search the web for anything they announced, launched, or wrote about in the last 7 days. Include: product releases, pricing changes, executive posts on LinkedIn/X, press coverage, and any GitHub or documentation updates that suggest strategy shifts. Return a bulleted list per company, with dates and source links, sorted most-recent first. Skip PR-fluff releases that don't reveal anything new.
Handoff: Copy these into a doc so you have them for the next step.
Identify the load-bearing changes
Goal: Filter the week's noise into the 2-4 things that actually matter to your strategy.
From the following weekly inputs [paste them], identify the 2-4 items that are load-bearing — the changes that would actually shift a competitor's strategic position or affect ours. Skip the incremental stuff. For each load-bearing change: what did they do, what does it imply about their bet, and what's the specific question it raises for us.
Draft the memo
Goal: One page. Four sections. Sendable Monday.
Draft a one-page weekly competitive digest memo using the load-bearing items above. Structure: (1) TL;DR — 2 sentences, (2) The two load-bearing changes and what they imply, (3) One thing we should discuss Monday, (4) Watching-not-acting list — 3 items we're tracking but not acting on this week. Voice: dry, specific, no adjectives.
Handoff: Post to your team's #strategy or equivalent channel with 'Weekly digest — 4 min read'. Do not add commentary in the post; the memo IS the commentary.
Archive for the trailing-4-week view
Goal: Keep every week's digest so you can spot patterns across a month.
Append this week's memo to my running competitive digest Project. In four weeks, ask me: 'What patterns have emerged across the last four digests that individual memos missed?' Prompt me on that question by dating a checkin.
Repeatability, not cleverness.
What lives where when the workflow finishes.
The memo goes to your team's strategy channel Friday afternoon. The archive lives in a LADLE Project called 'Competitive digest'. Every 4 weeks, trigger the pattern-review sub-workflow. If a load-bearing change requires action, that becomes a separate spec — the digest names it, it doesn't try to solve it.
The same shape, different jobs.
- Solo founder version — cut the Monday-discussion section; the memo goes into your own weekly review.
- Investor-updates variation — replace competitors with portfolio companies; same shape.
- Sector-tracking version — replace competitors with a market segment (e.g., 'DevTools funding rounds'); same shape.
- Deep-dive one-off — quarterly, run a fifth step that pulls the four weeks together into a 3-page analysis.
Try this workflow once. Then decide if it earns a recurring slot.
The value compounds after the third run, not the first.