Note: This article is based on a talk from the Product Marketing Summit by Bryan Nairn (Founder of Phase 2 Ventures) when he was still Head of Product Marketing at Kong.
When I joined Kong, I knew I was walking into a turnaround. There had been attrition on the team, leadership changes, and morale had slipped.
What I didn’t fully grasp until I got started was just how dated and fragmented our competitive intelligence was.
We didn’t have a functioning CI program, core product content was stale, and every competitive request from the field arrived as a Slack ping, duplicated across multiple channels, scattered, and always urgent.
It was clear we needed a reset.
Charley Gale
A problem of data, resources, and standards
The challenges boiled down to three things: data, resources, and standardization.
First, we lacked reliable, current competitive data. Without fresh battlecards or clear differentiators, our field sellers were left scrambling in deals.
Second, resources were thin. Like many pre-IPO software companies, we had ambitious goals but limited headcount and budget – and the broader market had just shifted away from “growth at all costs” toward “operational efficiency”. That meant less room for new hires or program spend.
Finally, whatever processes had existed in the past had broken down. Requests flew across Slack without coordination, and there was no single source of truth for competitive insights.
The intensity of competitive focus also surprised me. Coming from a place like Amazon, where the mantra is “customer obsession” and the company is the market leader, competitors rarely enter the conversation.
At Kong, the dynamic was different. The API management space is crowded and often commoditized. Competitors like Amazon API Gateway or Google Cloud Apigee are constantly releasing new features. Our sales teams needed answers, and they needed them yesterday.
Listening first: Who needs what
The first step was to map the landscape of stakeholders. One advantage of product marketing is that we’re already positioned at the intersection of sales, product, and marketing, so I had a natural license to talk to everyone.
What emerged was clear: sales teams needed quick access to differentiators to win deals; marketing wanted competitive angles for campaigns; and product and engineering wanted intelligence to inform the roadmap and help close gaps.
Just as important was understanding how people wanted to consume the information. It wasn’t enough to produce a battlecard and stash it in a folder.
We needed to embed competitive intelligence into the places where people already worked, whether that was Salesforce, Slack, or an internal portal.
Setting goals under constraint
Given our size and the budget environment, our goals had to be realistic. We weren’t going to stand up a sprawling CI function overnight. Instead, I focused on empowerment and scale.
The sales team needed to feel confident walking into deals with clear differentiators. Product and engineering needed to see where the market was moving so they could adjust priorities.
And the entire company needed a system where competitive intelligence could be accessed on demand, not delivered manually in response to every Slack ping. That meant self-service had to be a core design principle.
At the same time, I wanted to change the culture from reactive to proactive. Instead of fielding random requests, we would build a steady rhythm of insights that people could rely on.
Alex Walton
The building blocks: Collection, analysis, distribution
I approached the program in three parts: collection, analysis, and distribution.
Collection meant figuring out what types of data were most useful and how to capture them quickly. Public analyst reports and press releases only got us so far. The real gold was already inside our own walls: the sales team.
They were hearing about competitor pricing, performance issues, and deal dynamics every day. The trick was operationalizing that flow so insights didn’t get lost in Slack threads.
Analysis was about making raw intel usable. A PDF report, a partner presentation, and a customer anecdote each contain pieces of truth, but none are helpful on their own. We needed to clean and synthesize these fragments into clear narratives that different stakeholders could digest.
And finally, distribution had to be predictable and effortless. I’ve always liked the metaphor from Atomic Habits: if you want to eat more fruit, don’t hide it in the fridge drawer, put it in a bowl on the counter where you’ll see it.
We wanted competitive intelligence to be that visible. Regular digests, easy-to-find assets, and a central platform would make it part of people’s daily work rather than an occasional hunt.
Choosing a platform as a force multiplier
Given our constraints, we realized a dedicated CI platform was the only way to scale. Manually curating, formatting, and distributing competitive insights wasn’t sustainable. The platform became our force multiplier.
What sold us were integrations. We needed Salesforce integration so reps could access battlecards in the flow of work.
We needed Slack integration so competitive insights could be surfaced in-channel – and, just as importantly, so new nuggets from the field could be submitted with one click.
We even tied it into Okta so every employee could access it easily, which also gave us visibility into who was actually using the resources.
Pricing model was another key factor. One vendor charged per user seat, which would have doubled costs if our sales org doubled in size.
Another priced per competitor tracked, which better matched our reality. We ranked our competitors into tiers, licensed the most critical, and still had flexibility to track the long tail.
Carolyn Klinger
What success looks like
The impact was immediate. Those duplicative Slack requests that used to flood every channel all but disappeared. Instead, people went directly to the platform to find what they needed or to contribute new insights.
Enablement also became more sustainable. We rolled out a steady drumbeat: weekly competitive tips in Slack, monthly newsletters, and short “conquest” segments on our Monday sales calls, where we’d highlight a recent win against a competitor and explain how we did it. That rhythm built awareness and confidence over time.
Measurement gave us another advantage. We could see which assets were being used most, which competitors were getting the most attention, and even which regions were seeing different patterns.
That helped us prioritize where to invest next. Freshness of content improved too. If a field leader asked about IBM API Connect after a release, I could check the platform, confirm whether the battlecard had been updated, and push it live immediately.
One sales leader told me that Kong’s competitive intelligence program was among the best they’d seen. That kind of feedback is a boost, but it’s also a reminder: in sales, a thousand “attaboys” can be wiped away by a single “aw shucks.” The work has to continue every day.
Lessons and surprises
Along the way, I discovered two challenges I hadn’t anticipated.
The first was what I call “shadow CI.” Despite our efforts, some salespeople began creating their own competitive assets.
My first instinct was frustration – after all, we’d just invested in a program to centralize this work. But I realized it was a valuable signal. If people were building their own, either they didn’t know what existed, or what we had didn’t meet their needs. Both were solvable problems.
The second was the “sharing problem.” In many deals, a customer will ask for a competitive comparison.
The quickest way forward for a rep is to hand them something – anything – that ticks the box. But the risk is obvious: once a detailed internal battlecard leaves our hands, we can assume it will make its way to competitors.
To address this, we built external-facing versions: concise, polished, and useful, but without the sensitive detail that would give too much away.
Teresa Garanhel
Making competitive intelligence a habit
The real win wasn’t just standing up a CI program, it was making it part of the company’s rhythm.
By keeping distribution routine, being transparent about what’s coming, and giving teams the ability to self-serve, competitive intelligence stopped being an occasional scramble and started being a habit.
In a small company where product marketing also owns pricing, analyst relations, and solutions marketing, that kind of leverage is everything.
A well-run CI program doesn’t just make life easier for sales; it strengthens the entire organization’s ability to learn, adapt, and win.
Life after Slack chaos is better. And the best part? Now, when someone asks for competitive intel, the answer isn’t a frantic thread, it’s already waiting in the fruit bowl on the counter.
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