As the title mentions, I cannot believe I am halfway through with my time in Sweden! I’m doing my best to live in the moment, but I’m happy to say that I am nowhere near ready to leave yet. That being said, Summer in Stockholm has a way of throwing unexpected environments your way. As others have mentioned, Europe is currently experiencing a massive heatwave. To cope, my routine this week has involved escaping to the archipelago for a swim several times. The archipelago itself is absolutely breathtaking, but the water temperature took some getting used to. Compared to what I am used to in the United States, the Baltic water is practically freezing, hovering somewhere in the high 50s. While it took some serious adjusting, it has become the most exciting way to beat the heat.
That contrast between familiarity and the unfamiliar followed me into the weekend when I visited the historic Stockholm Stadium to watch Sweden play France in a football match. The stadium was completely packed, and the energy was palpable, yet the sports culture here is pretty different from America. Back home, a matchup of this magnitude would be a massive, rowdy production filled with tailgating, booming stadium speakers, and fans screaming until they lost their voices. Here, the culture is entirely different. People don’t get super loud or aggressive; instead, they stood politely, deeply focused on watching the game unfold (Maybe it’s because the game was free? I still can’t believe that) In fact, the absolute peak of intensity from the crowd occurred during the pre-game introductions when they booed the French players. That was as wild as things got, which I found hilarious.
Reflecting on my time here so far, I realized that I have been incredibly fortunate. For the most part, my supervisor provides very direct, clear instructions on what the ultimate objective needs to be. The ambiguity I face rarely stems from a lack of direction from leadership; rather, the uncertainty lies in the execution. I am frequently handed a high-level goal with zero roadmap on how to reach it, leaving it entirely up to me to pioneer a functional solution that fits our strategic needs.
When I do hit a wall of truly ambiguous information, I have learned that the best way to move forward is to look for historical guardrails. For instance, earlier in my internship when I was tasked with building out a complex competitor analysis from scratch, the parameters felt incredibly broad. Instead of guessing blindly, I reached out to my supervisor to ask for previous examples of successful internal reports. Securing those past templates didn’t take away my autonomy, but it gave me an essential baseline of the formatting, tone, and depth expected by the executive team, allowing me to clear the fog of uncertainty and execute efficiently.
That comfort with ambiguity paved the way for my absolute favorite project of the internship so far: creating a targeted list of our competitors’ current customers.
On paper, the prompt sounds simple, but in the realm of competitive intelligence, it is a massive puzzle. Both our competitors and their corporate clients have distinct reasons for wanting to remain completely anonymous. Competitors guard their client rosters fiercely to prevent poaching, and enterprise clients keep their software vendors quiet to protect their internal operations and data frameworks. Because there is no public directory of who buys what, I had to figure out a way to uncover this hidden data.
I decided the best way to bypass this anonymity was to turn our competitor’s own marketing strategies against them. I began diving deep into the publicly available “success stories,” case studies, and testimonial blogs published on our competitor’s website. While the competitor was careful to scrub the actual corporate names from these articles, their marketing team couldn’t help but brag about specific statistics, regional locations, employee counts, and precise implementation timelines to prove their platform’s value.
Treating these details like a puzzle, I cross-referenced those unique public metrics and corporate milestones with real-time data on LinkedIn and global business registries. By matching the anonymous data points to actual corporate profiles, I successfully unmasked the hidden clients.
To take the project a step further and deliver more value to our sales team, I highlighted the specific unmasked companies that had recently experienced public vulnerabilities or negative experiences (data leaks) with that competitor . By compiling these specific pain points, I gave our sales enablement team an incredibly tactical list of accounts that were likely already frustrated, vulnerable, and looking for an alternative.
This project was an incredible win for me. Having the complete independence to build a workflow from scratch taught me that uncertainty isn’t a barrier; it is an open invitation to innovate. There was a unique thrill in realizing that the competitor’s own advertising could be reverse-engineered into a roadmap for our sales pipeline, and I am incredibly proud of the solution I developed.