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Katrina Voss
I was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company for four years, which is exactly as long as it takes to learn how to build a strategy framework and realize that frameworks are the easy part. The hard part is getting a room full of executives to agree on what the data means when the data is ambiguous — which it always is.
My best Bain project was a competitive response analysis for a large European telecom. A new entrant was undercutting their pricing by 40%, and the CEO wanted to know: do we match the price, differentiate on quality, or let them take the low end? The "right" answer depended entirely on assumptions about the competitor's cost structure, which we couldn't observe, and the customer's price sensitivity, which the customer couldn't articulate. We built seven scenarios. The CEO picked the one that matched his intuition. That's strategy consulting.
I left Bain for Snowflake in 2021, where I built and led the competitive intelligence function. My job was to know more about Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Amazon Redshift than anyone else at the company — and to turn that knowledge into something the sales team could use in a deal and the product team could use in a roadmap decision.
Competitive intelligence is a strange discipline. Half the job is research: reading 10-Ks, analyzing product launches, talking to customers who evaluated competitors, and reverse-engineering pricing from public and private signals. The other half is synthesis: turning a thousand data points into a narrative that helps someone make a better decision. The synthesis is where most CI programs fail. They produce 80-page competitive decks that nobody reads instead of three-slide briefs that change how a sales rep positions a deal.
I started writing publicly in 2024 after leaving Snowflake. My first piece was a competitive analysis of the data infrastructure market that I published on my personal site. It was 9,000 words, had four original frameworks, and got shared by about a dozen VPs of Product at data companies who told me it was more useful than their own internal competitive docs. Signal reached out the same week.
I write about how companies actually compete — not the press release version, but the internal version: the war rooms, the pricing responses, the feature prioritization debates, the decision to enter or avoid a market. Strategy is not a plan. It's a series of bets made under uncertainty, and the quality of those bets depends on how honestly you assess the competitive landscape.
I live in Salt Lake City, where I moved from San Francisco in 2023 for the skiing. I also run a competitive intelligence community with about 1,200 members, which is how I source a lot of the non-public data that shows up in my articles.
Experience
- Head of Competitive Intelligence, Snowflake
- Strategy Consultant, Bain & Company
- BA Economics, University of Chicago