Competitive Intelligence — Advanced Features & Customization
Report scheduling, industry description strategy, and connecting intel to your planning workflow
Choosing Your Report Frequency
Lodestone supports two automatic report frequencies: Weekly and Biweekly.
| Frequency | Best for |
|---|---|
| Weekly | Fast-moving markets, active competitors, teams that want fresh signal every week |
| Biweekly | Stable markets, lighter workload preference, teams reviewing reports in fortnightly planning cycles |
Weekly reporting gives you higher-frequency signal but requires more time to review. Biweekly is a lower-effort cadence that still keeps you meaningfully current without adding weekly overhead.
Choosing the right day
Set the day to align with when you're already reviewing product context — for example, the day before your weekly planning meeting or the morning of your strategy review. Receiving a report when you're already in planning mode means you're more likely to act on it.
Getting Better Reports from Your Industry Description
The industry description is the single most important input to report quality. The AI uses it to frame what "competitive" means for your context — which competitors to focus on, what market positioning looks like, and what signals are worth surfacing.
What to include
- Market category — what category does your product sit in? (e.g. "product management tools", "revenue intelligence platforms", "B2B sales enablement software")
- Customer type — who buys your product? (e.g. "enterprise product teams", "early-stage startups", "mid-market SaaS companies")
- Key competitive dimensions — what do buyers in your market compare when evaluating options? (e.g. "integration depth", "AI features", "ease of onboarding")
What to avoid
- Generic descriptions ("we build software for businesses") — these produce generic reports
- Internal jargon — use market-standard terminology so the AI understands the competitive context
- Overly long descriptions — two to four focused sentences outperform a lengthy paragraph
Using the AI Competitor Suggestion Feature
The AI suggestion feature is particularly useful when:
- You're setting up a new workspace and want a starting point
- Your market has many players and you want to make sure you haven't missed anyone
- You've entered a new market segment and want to identify relevant competitors quickly
Suggestions are generated from your industry description. If the suggestions feel irrelevant, revise your industry description to be more specific before retrying.
The suggestion UI lets you review each suggestion before adding it — select the ones that are genuinely competitive and skip the others. You can run suggestions again at any time; Lodestone will not re-add competitors already in your list.
Building a Report-to-Backlog Workflow
The most powerful use of Competitive Intelligence is connecting it to your planning cycle. A structured workflow looks like this:
- Weekly report generates on your scheduled day
- Review the report — skim for significant moves by competitors
- Extract Features from Report — send the report to Extracts for AI analysis
- Review Extracts — evaluate the surfaced ideas. Add relevant ones to your backlog.
- Tag or annotate — use Feature tags to track which ideas came from competitive signals
This process turns competitive awareness from a passive activity into an active input to your roadmap. Over time, your backlog will reflect not just internal ideas and customer requests but also competitive responses — and you'll have a visible record of where ideas came from.
Interpreting a Competitive Intelligence Report
Reports are structured AI-generated documents that synthesize publicly available information about your competitors. A few things to keep in mind when reading them:
- Reports describe observable activity — what competitors are shipping, announcing, and positioning publicly. They don't speculate about internal strategy.
- Reports are a starting point, not a conclusion — use them to surface signals worth investigating, not as authoritative analysis.
- Recency matters — a weekly report is more timely than a biweekly one. If a competitor moves fast, consider increasing your frequency.
- Quality depends on industry description — if a report feels off-target, revisit and sharpen your industry description before generating the next one.
Managing a Large Competitor List
There is no hard limit on how many competitors you can track, but report quality degrades as the list grows. Practical guidance:
- Prioritize direct competitors — products that your prospects actively compare you against
- Include one or two aspirational benchmarks — market leaders you're likely to be measured against even if you don't compete directly
- Remove churned competitors — companies that have exited the market, pivoted, or are no longer relevant add noise
- Review the list quarterly — your competitive landscape changes; your tracker should reflect it
Next: Troubleshooting & FAQs — common issues with report generation, AI suggestions, and extract extraction.