Competitive Intelligence — Overview & Concepts
What it is, why it matters, and how it fits into Lodestone
What Is Competitive Intelligence?
The Competitive Intelligence module (labeled Intel in the navigation) is Lodestone's built-in system for tracking your competitors and generating AI-powered market insight reports. It keeps you and your team informed about the competitive landscape without requiring manual research.
Instead of periodically Googling your competitors or relying on sales to surface competitive signals, Competitive Intelligence delivers structured, AI-generated reports on a schedule you define — covering competitor activity, market positioning, and emerging trends in your space.
Why It Exists
Competitive awareness erodes quickly without a system. A team that reviewed its competitors six months ago may be missing significant shifts in the market today — new features shipped, pricing changes, positioning pivots, or new entrants.
The Competitive Intelligence module fixes this by making competitive monitoring automatic and regular. You define your competitors once. Lodestone generates reports on your schedule. The signal stays fresh without manual effort.
Beyond keeping you informed, there is a direct connection to product planning: competitive intelligence reports can feed the Extracts module, allowing insights from market analysis to flow directly into your feature backlog.
Key Concepts
Competitors
A competitor is a named company or product you want to track. You add competitors manually by name and optional website, or use AI-assisted suggestions based on your industry description. Competitors are the lens through which all reports are generated.
Intelligence Reports
A report is an AI-generated document that analyzes your competitors' public activity and positions it in the context of your market. Each report covers the competitors you have on record at the time it is generated. Reports have a status:
- Generating — the AI is currently producing the report
- Completed — the report is ready to read and download
- Failed — generation did not complete; a new report can be generated
Report Generation
Reports are generated on demand or on a recurring schedule. When you generate a report, Lodestone uses your competitor list and your organization's industry description to produce structured analysis. Generation typically takes a few minutes.
Industry Description
Your industry description is the context the AI uses to frame competitive analysis. A specific, accurate description produces more relevant output. It is set in the Competitive Intelligence settings and is separate from the Organization Description used by Documents.
Report Schedule
Reports can be generated automatically on a weekly or biweekly basis, on a day of the week you choose. This keeps your competitive picture current without requiring manual triggering.
Connecting Intel to Planning
One of the most powerful features of the Competitive Intelligence module is the ability to extract product ideas from a completed report. When you open a completed report, you can send it to the Extracts module for AI analysis — just as you would a meeting transcript. The AI surfaces feature ideas, problems, and opportunities found in the competitive analysis, which then appear in your extract queue for review.
This closes the loop between market intelligence and product planning:
Competitor ships a new feature → Lodestone generates a report → You extract feature ideas from the report → Ideas flow into your backlog
Extracts surfaced from competitive intelligence reports carry an Intel Report source badge, distinguishing them from transcript-sourced ideas.
How Competitive Intelligence Relates to the Rest of Lodestone
| Object | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Extracts | Completed reports can be fed to Extracts for AI analysis, surfacing feature ideas with an Intel Report source badge. |
| Features | Intel-sourced Extracts, when accepted, become Features in the backlog — just like transcript-sourced ones. |
| Settings | Industry description and report schedule are configured in the Competitive Intelligence settings panel. |
Who Can Use Competitive Intelligence
Any workspace member can view reports, add competitors, and generate reports. Configuring the report schedule and industry description is available to all members from within the module's Settings panel.
Next: How-tos & Workflows — step-by-step guides for adding competitors, generating reports, and extracting features from reports.