Head of Competitive Intelligence

Datadog is building a product-led Competitive Intelligence function to help inform product strategy, roadmap prioritization, positioning, and competitive readiness. As the Head of Competitive Intelligence you will build and lead the CompIntel function across priority competitors and adjacent market opportunities. You will translate competitor product evolution, technical capabilities, launches, pricing value, customer sentiment, analyst narratives, and ecosystem shifts into actionable insights for Product, GTM, Sales Engineering, Customer Success, Technical Advocacy, and leadership. In this highly technical, hands-on leadership role, you should understand how observability products are implemented, where workflows differ, what technical claims are credible, and how product gaps translate into customer impact. At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds, and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them. What You'll Do: Own the recurring competitive radar for Datadog’s priority competitor set, including taxonomy, source standards, evidence quality, and update cadence. Produce competitive deep dives, feature-gap analyses, early-warning briefs, and opportunity assessments tied to specific product domains and leadership questions. Translate CompIntel findings into roadmap recommendations, product differentiation hypotheses, and Product-facing decision guidance. Build and maintain a central CompIntel repository with competitor profiles, source notes, comparison frameworks, evidence logs, and decision-ready briefs. Convert validated findings into GTM-ready handoffs for battlecards, objection handling, strategic deal narratives, and field enablement. Synthesize signals from Product, Engineering, Sales Engineering, Customer Success, field teams, technical communities, Advocacy programs, win/loss, customer feedback, analyst research, public competitor materials, and CABs. Partner with Product Management to frame competitive questions, identify decision criteria, and connect findings to roadmap and prioritization discussions. Partner with Technical Advocacy to incorporate practitioner, customer, technical-market, community, event, and CAB signal into competitive analysis. Present concise, credible recommendations to Product leadership and Product + GTM forums. Maintain source transparency, legal compliance, ethical research practices, and auditable methods across competitive research workflows. Lead a small, high-impact team of CompIntel analysts and engineers. Who You Are: You have 8+ years of experience in competitive intelligence, technical product strategy, product management, market intelligence, strategic technical research, or related enterprise software work. You have strong technical fluency in one or more of the following areas: observability, cloud infrastructure, security, developer tooling, distributed systems or enterprise SaaS platforms. You are comfortable reading technical documentation, changelogs, release notes, architecture diagrams, product announcements, and public competitor materials. You can distinguish credible technical differentiation from surface-level claims. You can synthesize technical, commercial, customer, and market evidence into clear recommendations. You have strong executive writing skills and can produce concise memos, structured briefs, comparison frameworks, and leadership-ready recommendations. You can influence Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and leadership stakeholders without direct authority. You are comfortable working in ambiguous environments where the function, taxonomy, operating cadence, and stakeholder model need to be built from the ground up. You understand legal, ethical, and compliance considerations in competitive intelligence gathering. Bonus Points: Experience in observability, cloud infrastructure, security, developer tooling, platform engineering, or technical enterprise SaaS. Experience supporting Product Management or product strategy through technical analysis, roadmap inputs, customer evidence, or market intelligence. Experience building a competitive intelligence program, research repository, competitor taxonomy, or recurring market-monitoring process. Familiarity with SCIP ethics guidance, evidence governance, source transparency, and legally approved research metho