The email lands with a physical thud. That’s not possible, of course, but the feeling is there-a sudden, hollow weight in your stomach, the kind you get when you miss a step on the stairs in the dark. It’s an involuntary-hic-reaction. A competitor’s launch announcement. Their product looks suspiciously like yours. It has 13 of the same features. And the price is sitting there, glowing on the screen, a full 33% lower than yours.

Your first thought is a sticktail of disbelief and smugness. “They’re burning cash. They can’t possibly make a profit at that price. They’ll be gone in 3 quarters.” It’s a comforting story, the one where your competitors are idiots and you’re the savvy one. It’s the story we tell ourselves in boardrooms to avoid the much scarier alternative.

Your price, the one you and your team spent weeks deliberating 3 months ago, is based on information that is now effectively ancient history. It’s a fossil. You based it on supplier quotes from last season, shipping cost estimates from a different geopolitical climate, and a market analysis that didn’t account for a new processing patent filed 43 days ago in another country. Your competitor’s price is based on last Tuesday.

The Dynamic Game of Pricing

I have a friend, Cameron Z., who has one of the strangest jobs I’ve ever heard of. He’s a difficulty balancer for a massive online video game. He doesn’t design quests or create characters. His entire job is to watch data streams from millions of players and make tiny, constant adjustments to the game’s difficulty. If 23% of players are getting stuck on a particular boss for more than 43 minutes, he might nudge the boss’s health down by 3%. If a certain weapon is making a level too easy, he’ll dial its damage back by a fraction. His work is never done. The game is a living thing, a dynamic system responding to its players in real time. He isn’t making a quarterly plan for “fun.” He’s tuning it every single day.

Now, think about your pricing strategy. Is it a finished product, like a game sold on a plastic cartridge in 1993? Or is it a live service, like the game Cameron manages?

Most companies I’ve worked with treat pricing as a major, stressful event. It’s a fixed point in time. They gather the data, hold the meetings, make the PowerPoint, and chisel the number into a stone tablet. Then they defend that number for the next fiscal year, regardless of what the world does. It’s an exercise in ego, not business. It’s so easy to criticize this behavior, and I absolutely love pointing it out. Of course, this is where I’m supposed to tell you I’ve never made this mistake. But that would be a lie. I once set the price for a consulting package based on a key software license cost. Three months later, a junior analyst on my team discovered that the software company had shifted to a volume-based model, and our cost per seat had dropped by 43%. We’d been charging our clients for an expense we weren’t even incurring anymore, leaving a massive, clumsy gap for a competitor to slide right into. It was embarrassing. It was a failure of information velocity.

The value and accuracy of your data decay over time. The cost of raw aluminum from a supplier in one country, the average container shipping rate from a specific port, the current labor costs in a manufacturing hub-these aren’t static numbers. They are volatile, twitching streams of information. A quarterly report is a snapshot of a river; it tells you where the water was, not where it is. Relying on it to price your product is like trying to navigate that river with a photograph.

This is where people get stuck. They understand the concept, but the execution feels impossible. “How can I possibly track all of that in real time?” they ask. “We don’t have an army of analysts.” The complaint is fair. You can’t manually track every bill of lading, every supplier shift, every change in component cost across your entire industry. That’s not a human-scale problem. But the data exists. For instance, your competitors’ supply chains are not the black boxes you imagine them to be. You can get a shockingly clear picture of who they’re buying from, in what quantities, and how frequently, just by looking at public us import data. When you see their primary component supplier has shifted from a high-cost region to a new, lower-cost one, you don’t have to wonder how they dropped their price by 23%. You know.

This isn’t about just sourcing cheaper materials. This is about pricing with intelligence. Imagine if you knew that your biggest rival just received 3 massive shipments of a key component, likely securing a volume discount you don’t have. Your reaction to their new, lower price would shift from “They’re crazy” to “Okay, they have a 13% cost advantage for the next 3 months. How do we respond?” Maybe you emphasize a feature that uses a different component. Maybe you create a bundle. Maybe you adjust your own price in a specific segment where they are weakest. You move from reacting with emotion to responding with strategy.

Information Velocity: The New Moat

This all sounds hyper-technical and exhausting. I know. It feels like adding another 13 things to your to-do list. The temptation is to stick with the old way, the comfortable quarterly review. It’s predictable. It requires less effort. But this reluctance is a symptom of treating information as a chore, not an asset.

Let’s go back to my friend Cameron. His job is a tangent that loops right back to the center. Video games used to be products. You bought a box. It contained everything it would ever contain. The developers finished it, shipped it, and moved on. Now, the most successful games are services. They are never finished. They are constantly being balanced, updated, and changed in response to the community and the data. The developers who clung to the old “ship it and forget it” model are either out of business or work for the ones who adapted. Business is no different. Your product, your service, and especially your price, are not fixed artifacts. They are living things that must adapt to their environment or die.

The Cost of Standing Still

That feeling in your gut when you see a competitor’s price isn’t just shock. It’s a biological response to falling behind. It’s the feeling of being out of sync with the present moment. Your price is based on the past. Theirs is based on the now. The question isn’t whether they’re losing money. The question is, how much are you losing by standing still?