Blog · Tag
opinion.
14 posts in this archive.
The moat question, revisited
Opinion. A year in, where the durable advantage lives for a grounded-AI proposal product — and where it doesn't. Three candidate moats, two I believe in, one I don't.
The 'we lost on price' excuse, decoded
What 'we lost on price' actually masks. An opinion piece, with evidence from the GAO debrief corpus and the patterns I've watched in our own win-loss data.
Win-loss intelligence starts on day one
Most teams collect the wrong signals after a bid, and the wrong signals compound. An opinion piece on what to capture from the moment the RFP lands, not the day after the award email.
The SOC 2 attestation is not the end of the questionnaire
A newly-attested SOC 2 Type II does not stop the questionnaires. Buyers still ask the same 200 questions, and what that tells us about how enterprise trust is actually built.
DDQ fatigue is a security risk, not a productivity problem
Opinion. Rushing a 300-question security questionnaire at 11pm on a Thursday does not just cost time. It degrades real security posture, and the industry keeps framing it as a staffing issue.
Grounded AI is not a feature, it's a refusal
Opinion. The thing that makes grounded AI different from regular AI is what the system refuses to do — answer when retrieval is empty. Here's what we will not ship even when reviewers ask for it.
SME collaboration, reconsidered: the preview
The async-first SME workflow we wrote about all year was half-right. Two hundred real interviews and a year of customer data later, here is what we got right, what we got wrong, and what the canonical post tomorrow will argue.
The overpriced document repository trap
An opinion piece on why most RFP tools end up unused. The reviews tell a consistent story across Loopio, Responsive, and Qvidian: teams pay for AI features and end up using a search box. We have a theory about why.
SME collaboration is a UI problem
An opinion piece. Why 48% of teams still cite SME wrangling as their #1 problem after five years of vendor promises — and why the answer is not another tool but a better surface for the SME.
Why we don't do autonomous proposal agents yet
An opinion piece. What an agentic drafting system would have to guarantee that retrieval doesn't, why we don't think the category is ready, and the work we'd want to see before changing our position.
Stop announcing features, announce what changed for the reader
An announcement that names a feature is a press release. An announcement that names what changed in the reader's day is a useful one. A short field note on what we'll publish under 'shipped' from now on.
Content library vs. knowledge base is not semantics
The vendors call it a content library. We call it a knowledge base. The two words name two different products. Why I think the distinction is the most important one in this category.
RFP software is a vocabulary problem
The terms vendors use — content library, AI suggestion, workflow automation — are doing too much work. Rename them and the failure modes get obvious. An opinion piece on why the category's marketing language is the bug.
The RFP software category is broken in three specific ways
An opinionated walk through three concrete failure modes in the current RFP software category — generic AI, opaque pricing, and rotting libraries — with citations to the public reviews and research that back each one up.
See the proposal workflow
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