Let the CEO hatch the grand schemes. Let the General Manager make the management presentations and get the credit. Let Marketing create their wonderful stories about the future. Let the Product Manager be the face that most associate with the product. Your job, simply put, is to make their dreams possible. You, and your teams, organize the people, harness the technologies, execute the processes and deliver the products that fuel all of those dreams.

Most of the time, you have to focus on the concrete. There is not time to think fancifully or speculatively about the future. Taking your eye off the ball means that something could slip and that would result in many unhappy people. You take pride in avoiding such disappointments. You are reliable, conscientious and inclined to precision.

Still, you are not oblivious to what is happening in the world and among your competitors. Their engineering organizations are trying to beat yours. Some of the things that they do are outstanding. Their technology bets are sometimes different from yours. Product teardowns have given you insight into their product architecture and there are things to admire. You wonder if you doing everything that needs to be done to win. What should you be learning and changing to stay in front? How would you know?

It is a balancing act. Keep the processes humming while surveying the competitive landscape occasionally to understand where and how to improve. It would be great to have help with this. Perhaps Competitive Intelligence could help. Here are some possibilities.

• Understand the technology strategies. You have your own assessment of the critical technologies for your product space. It makes sense to you but you recognize that other smart people are making different choices for good reasons. Sometimes the reasons are due to a different development cultures or product priorities. On the other hand, sometimes competitors are investing to create or integrate capabilities that will help them pass you in the market. Competitive Intelligence maps the key technology choices and capabilities of competitors including their innovations.
• Map the architectural decisions. When you examine competitor products, you look past the obvious to understand the underlying architectural choices. The subsystem designs, interface mechanisms and industry standards employed signal something about your competitors’ intentions and capabilities. The architectural decisions also tell you much about their future flexibility. Competitive Intelligence organizes information about competitors’ product architectures and how those architectures affect future products and capabilities.
• Benchmark the processes. Part of your responsibilities is tracking your internal success metrics. Assessing where and how to improve is a priority. There are measurements for quality, on time delivery, R&D efficiency and so on. Over time, improving these measures gives your company significant advantages. The advantages are multiplied when your performance clearly exceeds competitors’ performance. Competitive Intelligence builds multi-dimensional comparisons of operational processes and their effectiveness.
• Track the people. Nothing works well without high trained and motivated people. Much of your time is assembling and aligning the right set of people to implement the company’s strategies. Meanwhile, your competitors are after some of the same people. Of course, their plans for future products are often evident because of who they are attempting to hire. Certain skill sets are becoming more important while others are declining in importance. Competitive Intelligence tracks competitors’ hiring plans and helps interpret the meaning of people related actions.
• Judge the capabilities. Your team has a record of accomplishment of what they can produce over time. Many times Marketing or management will ask you about future possibilities because of competitive pressures. They fundamentally want to know how your team’s capabilities compare to those of key competitors. Having that comparison, enables you and the company to properly make judgments about future options. Competitive Intelligence creates models of overall performance over time at each competitor.

Most the time, attention to what is happening inside the company and, particularly, your engineering organization consumes your energy and attention. Nevertheless, you did not advance to a leadership position by ignoring the competitive threats. With just a little information, you know that your team can match or exceed what any of the competitors are doing. The right set of competitive intelligence activities can supply that information to you. It is time to get started.