Step 1 (days 1–3): name the competitors and approve the sources
List the competitors the brief will cover and, for each, the public sources the Research Analyst Digital FTE may read: website and pricing pages, press and announcements, job postings, public filings, and any research reports you hold, with licence terms noted. Nothing non-public, ever. Set the questions the brief answers each week: pricing changes, product announcements, hiring signals, positioning shifts.
Record how competitive information reached the team before: usually a mix of sales anecdotes and occasional reading, which is the baseline the brief replaces.
Step 2 (days 4–5): fix the structure and the citation standard
Set the brief's structure in the remit, the same every week: what changed since last week first, then a snapshot per competitor, cross-competitor trends, implications for you labelled as interpretation, and open questions. Set the citation standard: every claim points to the page and the capture date; a claim about intent, such as a hiring pattern suggesting a push into a segment, is labelled as an inference from cited evidence.
Set the cadence and the day, and the per-mission budget, which is small because the source list is bounded.
- Changes since last week, first
- Per-competitor snapshot
- Cross-competitor trends
- Implications, labelled as interpretation
- Open questions
Step 3 (day 7): the first brief runs
The first brief runs as a recurring mission and appears in the Library and the morning brief. Read it for two things: whether every claim has a citation you can follow, and whether the changes section leads with what actually matters. Send back anything that does not meet the standard with a reason; the standard is a remit rule.
Expect the first brief to be longer than later ones, because there is no previous week to diff against.
Step 4 (days 8–14): read, refine, and adopt
Share the first brief with the people who talk about competitors most, usually sales and product, and ask one question: what do you believe about a competitor that this brief does not cite? Those beliefs become open questions for the next cycle or source additions now. Refine the source list from what the FTE could and could not find, and approve any additions it proposed when an approved source mentioned a competitor not yet on the list.
By day fourteen the second brief has run, the changes section is short and specific, and the team has a fact base with citations rather than a set of stories.
What does done look like at day 14?
Done is a brief that arrives on the same day each week in the same structure, cites every claim to a page and a date, labels every inference, leads with what changed, and is read by the people who need it. Competitive claims in the company now have two states: cited in the brief, or an open question for the next one. The manager's time is a few minutes to read it and an occasional source approval.
Over a quarter the briefs form a dated, cited history of the landscape, which is what a market-entry assessment or a positioning decision can draw on later.
What should you refuse to do?
Refuse any source that is not public and approved. Refuse a claim about a competitor's plans that is not labelled as inference from cited evidence. Refuse to let the structure drift, because comparability across weeks is the brief's value. And refuse to treat a sales anecdote as fact until the brief has either cited it or listed it as open.
The refusals are the discipline that makes competitive intelligence trustworthy rather than exciting.
One last practical point: give the brief a named reader. A weekly document nobody is responsible for reading decays into noise within a month; a brief that one person in sales and one in product read every week, and whose open questions they answer or forward, stays sharp, and the source list stays current because the readers notice what is missing before the FTE does. The mission's small budget makes this one of the cheapest recurring pieces of work a Digital FTE does, and one of the most read.