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Pearl: Calendly conducts quarterly competitive wargaming across product teams

Annie Pearl · Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO) · Feb 26, 2023 · at 47:44

Annie Pearl, Chief Product Officer at Calendly, describes Calendly's internal process for tracking competitive market dynamics.

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“Another fun one we do is something we call competitive wargaming. So, you know, on a some sort of time interval, at times it's been quarterly, we'll have assigned people into groups for the quarter to own a competitor, and their job is to essentially, you know, spend a lot of time immersing themselves into the product of the competitor, really trying to think through the lens of do a SWOT analysis, really trying to think through the lens of where's this competitor going and, you know, how she can only think about that as it relates to our strategy. And so we spent a quarter doing that. And then we have sort of the competitive wargaming day where every team comes and presents and there's prizes and it's a lot of fun, but it's a really great way to stay on top of what's happening across the market without, you know, sort of requiring every product manager or designer to be deep in the weeds on a lot of different competitors.”

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