Building in isolation doesn’t fail dramatically, but quietly drifts.
You stop seeing what’s obvious to people outside your building or corporate bubble. Your assumptions get set in concrete and our blind spots become strategy.
My go-to sources:
Private operator communities and industry Slack groups. The conversations are different when there’s no sales pitch attached.
Practitioner podcasts. Not the polished keynote, large org, or marketing fluff. The ones where someone walks through what broke and what it cost them.
Public competitor research. Not the thought leader, gatekept reports. LinkedIn job posts, tech stack trackers, review sites, hacker news, curated twitter feeds. What a company is hiring for tells you where they think they’re going.
None of this costs money. It does take time to curate, but the results are worth it. It just requires us to set aside the assumption we already see or know the full picture.