The work we were always supposed to do

Every commercial job description has a line in it about staying close to the market. Know your competitors. Understand your customers. Spot the trends early. Feed it into the plan.

We have written that line, and we have been measured on it. We have also, honestly, not done it.

Not because it was unimportant. Because Monday happened. A deal slipped, a customer escalated, a forecast needed rebuilding, someone left and their accounts needed covering. The market work was always the thing that could wait one more week, because nothing breaks on the day you skip it.

Here is what it looked like in practice. The competitor deck got refreshed when a kickoff forced it, roughly once a year, by whoever had the fewest fires that week. Account plans got written the week before the review, from memory and a quick look at the customer's press page. Roadmap discussions leaned on whoever happened to have read something interesting. And the answer to "what is happening in our industry" was usually a LinkedIn post someone half remembered.

The uncomfortable part is that the cost of this is invisible. Nobody sends you an alert saying you walked into a meeting not knowing your customer had a new CTO, or that a competitor quietly dropped the pricing model you still argue against. You find out later, if at all, and usually in a deal you lost for reasons that got written down as "price".

We tried the usual fixes. A shared folder. A newsletter someone volunteered to write. Google Alerts, which mostly told us about ourselves. A quarterly market update slide that was really a summary of the last one. Each of them worked for about six weeks, which is roughly how long any process survives when it depends on someone finding spare time.

The pattern was clear. This was never a skills problem or a willingness problem. It was a time problem, and time was the one thing none of us were going to get more of.

That is the problem we set out to fix.