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As a Product Manager, staying ahead of the competition isn't just an advantage—it's a necessity. You're not just building a product; you're navigating a complex ecosystem where every decision can make or break your success. This is where competitive analysis comes into play, serving as your compass in the often turbulent waters of the market.
Bret Taylor, a tech industry veteran with an impressive resume, including executive stints at Google, Facebook, and his own startup Quip, understands this better than most. Despite his pedigree of working with tech giants, Taylor often found himself in the role of David rather than Goliath. As he shared at First Round's CEO Summit, "I think I'm personally driven to 'fix' product experiences that seem backward or antiquated, which seem to be by-products of industries with heavily entrenched competition." This mindset underscores a crucial truth: no matter the size of your company or the strength of your product, you're always competing against established norms and expectations.
But competitive analysis isn't just about keeping tabs on your rivals or trying to match them feature for feature. It's about gaining a deep, nuanced understanding of the market landscape, customer needs, and the unique value your product can offer. As Jacob Koshy of Zeda.io points out, a good competitive analysis is about developing actionable insights on how to achieve sustainable competitive differentiation and deliver unique customer value.
This comprehensive approach to competitive analysis can reveal opportunities that go far beyond simple feature parity. It can inform your product strategy, guide your innovation efforts, and even reshape your understanding of what's possible in your market. In this essay, we'll dive deep into the art and science of competitive analysis for product managers. We'll explore how to identify and categorize your competitors, the key components of a thorough analysis, and how to turn these insights into actionable strategies. We'll also look at common pitfalls to avoid and best practices to adopt.
Whether you're launching a new product or managing an established offering, mastering competitive analysis will empower you to make smarter decisions, differentiate your product effectively, and ultimately deliver more value to your customers.
Let’s dig in…
Understanding the Competitive Landscape
Your first step in mastering competitive analysis as a Product Manager or Product Leader is to gain a comprehensive view of your market's competitive landscape. This process goes beyond simply identifying who your competitors are – it's about understanding the broader context in which your product exists and competes.
Diana Hsieh of LogRocket emphasizes the importance of this holistic approach by contending that you don't build products in a vacuum. When bringing a product to market, you’re introducing it to customers who have preexisting notions of what they need and want – and those notions are largely shaped by competitors. This makes it even more important to have a thorough understanding of the competitive landscape in order to feed into an effective product strategy.
Let's start with the basics: identifying your competitors. It's tempting to focus solely on direct competitors – those offering products or services similar to yours. However, this narrow view can leave you vulnerable to disruption from unexpected quarters. The team at Aha! adeptly points out that it's equally important to consider indirect competitors – companies that offer different solutions to the same customer needs.
Consider the case of Kodak, once a giant in the photography industry. Kodak's focus on direct competitors in film photography left them blind to the threat posed by digital cameras and, later, smartphones. By the time they recognized these indirect competitors as a serious threat, it was too late to pivot effectively. This cautionary tale illustrates why casting a wide net in your competitive analysis is crucial.
So, how do you identify these competitors, both direct and indirect? Jacob Koshy suggests starting with customer feedback. What other products do potential customers mention during demos? If a customer leaves your product, where do they go? This customer-centric approach can reveal competitors you might not have considered otherwise.
Another effective method is keyword research. This can be as simple as entering your product category into a search engine and seeing which products appear in the results. For a more sophisticated approach, you might track organic search rankings and analyze which companies are competing for similar ad placements.
Once you've identified your competitors, it's time to dig deeper into the market dynamics. This is where Michael Porter's Five Forces analysis comes in handy – as it can help you evaluate the competitive intensity and attractiveness of your market by considering five key factors: the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitutes, bargaining power of customers, bargaining power of suppliers, and competitive rivalry.
Let's take a closer look at how this might play out in practice. Imagine you're a product manager for a new project management software platform. The threat of new entrants might be high due to relatively low barriers to entry in the software market. The threat of substitutes could come from simple tools like spreadsheets or even pen-and-paper methods. Customers might have significant bargaining power due to the abundance of options in the market. Suppliers (in this case, perhaps cloud infrastructure providers) might have moderate power. And competitive rivalry is likely intense given the number of players in the project management space.
Understanding these forces gives you a clearer picture of the challenges and opportunities in your market. It might reveal, for instance, that differentiating on features alone isn't enough – you might need to focus on building switching costs to reduce customer bargaining power or on creating partnerships to mitigate the threat of new entrants.
But the competitive landscape isn't static – it's constantly evolving. As Bret Taylor's experience at Google shows, sometimes the most significant competitors are not the current market leaders but emerging players with innovative approaches. Taylor and his team didn't just try to create a better MapQuest; they reimagined the entire concept of digital maps, creating a product that changed user behavior and expectations.
This underscores the importance of continuous monitoring and analysis. As Matt Hicks points out, especially as tech is changing so rapidly, competitive analysis needs to be refreshed periodically. It's not a one-time exercise but an ongoing process of observation, analysis, and strategic adjustment.
As you map out your competitive landscape, remember that the goal isn't just to understand who your competitors are but to gain insights that will inform your product strategy. Are there unmet needs in the market that your product could address? Are there emerging trends that you could capitalize on? Are there weaknesses in competitor offerings that you could turn into opportunities?
By developing a comprehensive understanding of your competitive landscape, you're laying the groundwork for more effective product decisions. You're not just reacting to what competitors are doing – you're positioning yourself to anticipate market shifts, identify opportunities for innovation, and ultimately, to create products that truly stand out in a crowded market.
Deep Dive: Components of Effective Competitor Analysis
Once you've mapped out your competitive landscape, it's time to roll up your sleeves and dig into the nitty-gritty of competitor analysis. This process is about more than just creating a feature comparison chart - it's about developing a nuanced understanding of your competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and overall market positioning.
Let's start with a fundamental tool in the product manager's arsenal: the SWOT analysis. Subjecting each primary competitor to a thorough evaluation of their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats can provide invaluable insights. This analysis goes beyond surface-level observations, delving into aspects like brand reputation, market share, distribution channels, and customer base.
Consider the case of Slack, the team communication platform. When it entered the market, established players like Microsoft and Google already had messaging solutions. However, Slack's SWOT analysis might have revealed that while these giants had strong brand recognition (a strength), their enterprise focus left an opportunity in the startup and SMB market. Slack's user-friendly interface and integration capabilities turned out to be key strengths that helped it rapidly gain market share.
This approach to competitive analysis goes beyond feature parity. As Diana Hsieh of LogRocket notes, "You might be 10X better, but your customers may not even understand why it's important that you're better. Your customers might actually be judging your product on a completely different axis, and they won't even notice your differences." It’s another example of how your customers may not necessarily care what features your competitors offer but how those features translate into value for the customer.
To gain this deeper understanding, Matt Hicks suggests going beyond publicly available information. Sign up for competitor products, attend their webinars, and analyze their sales and marketing materials. This firsthand experience can reveal nuances in user experience, feature implementation, and overall product quality that might not be apparent from a feature list alone.
Pricing and value propositions are another critical component of competitor analysis. It's not just about knowing your competitors' price points - it's about understanding the value customers perceive in their products compared to yours. Are they offering better value for a similar price? Or are they positioning themselves as a premium option?
Marketing and positioning strategies are equally important to analyze. Pay attention to how competitors describe themselves, what pain points they claim to solve, and how they differentiate themselves in the market. This information can be gleaned from their websites, press releases, and marketing materials.
For instance, when Zoom entered the video conferencing market, it wasn't just competing on features. Its marketing emphasized simplicity and reliability - "It just works" became a key message. This positioning helped Zoom stand out in a crowded market that included established players like Skype and WebEx. When the 2020 pandemic forced everybody to work from homes, it was Zoom – not those two platforms – that most employees found themselves essentially living inside of day-to-day.
Effective competitor analysis requires a balance of breadth and depth. You need to look at a wide range of factors - from product features to marketing strategies - but also dig deep to understand the why behind your competitors' choices. Why did they choose that pricing model? Why are they emphasizing certain features in their marketing?
By developing this comprehensive understanding of your competitors, you're not just gathering information - you're positioning yourself to identify gaps in the market, anticipate competitor moves, and ultimately, to create products that truly stand out.
Beyond Features: Analyzing the Full Competitive Picture
While product features and capabilities are crucial elements of competitive analysis, they're just the tip of the iceberg. To truly understand your competitive landscape, you need to dive deeper, examining aspects that might not be immediately visible but can have a profound impact on your product's success.
One often overlooked aspect is the competitor's business model and value chain. As Alok Abhishek reminds us, the business model is the building block of sustainable competitive advantage. By overlaying the value chain and business model canvas, you can create a value curve for your specific industry, providing insights into the factors of competition and the competitive profile of each company.
When Netflix first entered the market, it wasn't just competing with Blockbuster on the basis of movie selection. Netflix's entire business model - DVD-by-mail with no late fees - was a fundamental reimagining of how people could access entertainment. Later, its shift to streaming wasn't just a technological upgrade; it was a complete transformation of its value chain and business model. This approach allowed Netflix to outmaneuver competitors who were still tied to traditional distribution methods.
Another critical factor to assess is market share and growth trajectories. Understanding how your competitor ranks in the market can provide valuable context for your competitive strategy. However, it's not just about current market share - you need to look at growth trends and potential future scenarios. If you can foresee massive changes in the market – what’s happened historically may not matter as much as how things are evolving. This can be done in a macro way, but it can also be done by closely monitoring the product roadmaps of your competitors. To that end, it’s also important to look beyond the product itself to the broader ecosystem that surrounds it. This includes aspects like third-party integrations, developer communities, and complementary products. As Bret Taylor noted in his experience at Google, sometimes the power of a product lies not just in its core functionality but in how it enables and interacts with other tools and services.
Lastly, it's crucial to consider the regulatory and economic environment in which you and your competitors operate. Changes in regulations, economic conditions, or global events can significantly impact the competitive landscape. For instance, the introduction of GDPR in Europe had far-reaching implications for tech companies, forcing them to adapt their data practices and potentially changing their competitive positioning.
By looking beyond features to analyze the full competitive picture, you're not just understanding what your competitors are doing today - you're gaining insights into their strategic direction, their strengths and vulnerabilities, and the broader context in which you're all operating. This comprehensive view allows you to make more informed decisions, anticipate market shifts, and position your product for long-term success.
From Analysis to Action: Leveraging Competitive Insights
One crucial application of competitive insights is in informing your product roadmap and feature prioritization. Diana Hsieh of LogRocket emphasizes this point, noting that understanding your competitive landscape helps you prioritize which areas to focus on – whether it’s figuring out which features to build first, which channels to prioritize, marketing or sales strategies to deploy, and much more. It’s not about simply doing what your competitors are doing. But understanding what’s happening within the competitive landscape can at least inform decisions that you make.
Competitive insights can also play a crucial role in shaping your pricing strategy. As the team at Aha! points out that understanding how customers perceive the value of competitors' products compared to yours can help you position your offering more effectively. This doesn't always mean lowering your price. In fact, a thorough competitive analysis might reveal opportunities to charge a premium by highlighting unique value propositions. For Zoom, it originally offered a freemium model with generous limits on the free tier. This approach, informed by an understanding of the frustrations users had with existing paid solutions, allowed Zoom to quickly build a large user base and eventually convert many of these users to paid plans.
Beyond product and pricing decisions, competitive insights can significantly enhance your sales and marketing efforts. Matt Hicks suggests creating sales battlecards, arming your sales team with information about strengths and weaknesses in competitors' products, and how to address common customer questions and concerns.
It's important to note, however, that leveraging competitive insights isn't about reactively chasing your competitors' every move. The goal is to use your understanding of the competitive landscape to make proactive, strategic decisions that position your product for long-term success. This might mean making bold moves that your competitors aren't expecting. When Apple introduced the iPhone, it wasn't just competing with existing smartphones in terms of features. It was creating an entirely new category of mobile devices, informed by a deep understanding of user needs and frustrations with existing mobile technology.
Competitive analysis can also inform your partnerships and ecosystem strategy. Understanding where your competitors are, strong or weak, can help you identify strategic partnerships that complement your offerings. Salesforce's acquisition of Slack is a prime example of how competitive insights can drive ecosystem expansion, allowing Salesforce to strengthen its position against competitors like Microsoft.
In the end, the true value of competitive analysis lies not in the information gathered but in the actions it inspires. By translating your competitive insights into concrete strategies and decisions, you can create products that don't just compete but lead.
Best Practices and Pitfalls to Avoid
As with any critical business process, competitive analysis comes with its own set of best practices to follow and pitfalls to avoid. Mastering these can mean the difference between a competitive analysis that gathers dust and one that drives real strategic value.
One of the most crucial best practices is maintaining objectivity. It's all too easy to let biases creep in, either overestimating your own strengths or underestimating those of your competitors. It’s been well documented that when Netflix emerged as a competitor, Blockbuster's leadership reportedly laughed off the threat, believing their established brand and extensive network of physical stores would protect them. This lack of objectivity in their competitive analysis ultimately contributed to Blockbuster's downfall. The lesson here is clear: approach your competitive analysis with a critical, unbiased eye, even if—especially if—the results challenge your existing assumptions. While the product manager often leads a competitive intelligence process, input from sales, marketing, customer support, and engineering can provide valuable insights that can help you be even more objective.
One common pitfall is what we might call "feature obsession." As Diana Hsieh of LogRocket wisely notes, you may believe that your features are 10x better than your competitors – however, it may not be clear to your competitors why your product is actually best. It's easy to get caught up in feature-by-feature comparisons, but remember that customers often make decisions based on factors beyond just feature sets.
Bret Taylor's experience with Google Maps illustrates this point beautifully. The team didn't just try to add more features than MapQuest; they fundamentally reimagined the user experience. "We made our users a little bit uncomfortable," Taylor recalls, "but in doing so we reset their expectations and new behaviors came out of it." The takeaway? Don't just focus on matching or beating your competitors' features. Instead, use your competitive analysis to identify opportunities to change the game entirely.
Continuous monitoring and updating of competitive intelligence is another crucial best practice. Your competitive landscape is not static; new players emerge, existing competitors pivot, and market conditions change. A one-time competitive analysis quickly becomes outdated and potentially misleading. However, be wary of the pitfall of analysis paralysis. While thorough analysis is important, don't let the pursuit of perfect information prevent you from taking action.
The goal is to be well-informed, not omniscient.
Lastly, it's important to address the ethical considerations in competitive research. While it's crucial to gather as much information as possible about your competitors, it's equally important to do so through legal and ethical means. This means respecting intellectual property rights, adhering to terms of service when using competitor products, and being transparent about your identity when interacting with competitors or their customers.
By following these best practices and avoiding common pitfalls, you can ensure that your competitive analysis efforts yield valuable insights that drive real strategic value.
Summing it all up
As we've explored throughout this essay, competitive analysis is far more than a checkbox exercise for product managers—it's a critical tool for navigating the complex landscape your product lives within. But knowledge without action is merely trivia. So, as you move forward in your product management journey, consider these key takeaways:
- Make competitive analysis an ongoing practice, not a one-time event. Markets evolve, competitors pivot, and customer needs shift. Establish a regular cadence for updating your competitive intelligence and create processes to quickly disseminate key insights to relevant stakeholders across your organization.
- Look beyond features to understand the full competitive picture. While product capabilities are important, don't neglect factors like business models, market trends, and ecosystem dynamics. Sometimes, the most significant opportunities for differentiation lie in reimagining the entire product experience or business model, not just in adding new features.
- Transform insights into action. The true value of competitive analysis lies not in the information gathered but in how you use it. Whether it's informing your product roadmap, refining your pricing strategy, or enhancing your sales and marketing efforts, ensure that your competitive insights are directly feeding into your decision-making processes and strategic planning.
By embracing these principles, you'll be well-equipped to not just compete but to lead in your market. Remember, the goal isn't to copy your competitors or to reactively chase their every move. Instead, use your deep understanding of the competitive landscape to chart your own course, creating products that truly stand out and deliver unique value to your customers.
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