Collection Cadence Design

Intelligence collection without a cadence is binge-and-starve. You spend three hours deep-diving a competitor before a big meeting, then ignore them for six weeks until the next meeting. The gap between collection cycles is where you get blindsided. A cadence distributes collection effort across time so that no signal goes unmonitored for more than a defined interval. Daily scans catch breaking developments. Weekly deep dives reveal emerging patterns. Monthly landscape reviews provide strategic context. Each operates at a different depth and frequency, and together they form a complete collection rhythm.

The daily scan takes fifteen minutes. Open your monitoring dashboard — Google Alerts, LinkedIn notifications, job board alerts, news aggregator — and scan for anything that triggers your collection priorities. You are not analyzing. You are triaging. Flag anything noteworthy, log it with a date and source, and move on. The weekly deep dive takes sixty minutes. Pick one competitor or one strategic question and go deep: check all five tiers, look for patterns across sources, update your intelligence files. The monthly landscape review takes two hours. Step back and evaluate the competitive environment as a whole: who is gaining, who is losing, what trends are accelerating, what surprises emerged.

1. Daily Scan (15 minutes) Triage your alerts and monitoring feeds. Flag noteworthy signals. Log date, source, and a one-line summary. Do not analyze — just collect and tag. Consistency matters more than depth at this frequency.
2. Weekly Deep Dive (60 minutes) Pick one competitor or one strategic question. Check Tiers 1-3 for new signals. Cross-reference with your daily scan log. Update your competitor files. Write one paragraph of analysis: what changed this week and why it matters.
3. Monthly Landscape Review (2 hours) Evaluate the full competitive environment. Review all competitor files. Identify trends across the landscape. Update your competitive positioning map. Write a one-page landscape summary that can be shared with stakeholders.