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What are your competitors doing? Does it matter?
When you’re deciding what to include in and exclude from your product, there are a variety of factors you need to consider. Hopefully, the first thing that comes to mind is customer needs. A couple of other factors include your market and your competition. It’s helpful to understand what other solutions customers use to solve their problems, but you shouldn’t become infatuated with adding every single feature your competitors have. Here are some resources on the proper place that competitive analysis fits in your product discovery efforts.
Meanwhile, in product news, the entire staff of a game developer quit, AI now turns academic papers into podcasts and creates A/B tests from A/B tests. And California wants you to be safe when you doing either, and anything else using AI.
Competitive Analysis — Your Ultimate Guide. Nasir Ahmed explains how getting to grips with the ins and outs of a UX competitor analysis can help you know your market, product and goals better. You will also understand the competition, get actionable insights, and boost your brand. With an almost limitless number of competitors out there all vying for attention, the heat is on to understand exactly what you are doing right (or wrong) to create an effortless user experience and a product that people enjoy using.
How do you conduct a competitive product analysis, and why should you do so? Customers have to weigh many options any time they make a purchase. So, it pays for your brand and products to stand out against the competition. But what does make your offerings stand out? And how can you be “the only choice” against your competitors? This is where a competitive analysis for your products comes in. It’s the best way to understand how to outpace your competitors and where you may fall behind. Carly Hill walks you through how to do a competitive product analysis today to inspire your offerings and brand positioning for tomorrow.
Is focusing on customers the wrong strategy for building successful products? Andrea Saez needed a couple of days to cool down before writing a response to M H Smith’s suggestion to focus on your competitor, pivot off their ideas to build something better, and only then ask if what you’ve built is valuable to your customers. Andrea’s response to the suggested prominence of competitive analysis was to invoke Product rule 101: “Identify a customer, figure out their problem, and solve it.”
Mastering Competitive Analysis: A product manager’s guide to outmaneuvering the market. 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. Mike Belsito dives deep into the art and science of competitive analysis for product managers. He explores how to identify and categorize your competitors, the key components of a thorough analysis, and how to turn these insights into actionable strategies.
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This week on Rocketship.fm:
Going beyond usage metrics to measure real product impact
In this episode of Rocketship.FM, Connor Joyce, author of "Bridging Intention to Impact," challenges the assumption that high usage metrics equate to product success. Drawing from his experience at Microsoft and various startups, Connor introduces a comprehensive framework for measuring genuine impact on user outcomes and business goals. He shares key concepts like the user outcome connection, feature impact analysis, and the insights hub, offering practical strategies for product teams to move beyond surface-level metrics and create a culture of evidence-based decision-making.
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INDUSTRY Virtual: The Product Conference is coming up, and you can bring your entire product team for a flat rate of $5,000, regardless of size. Your company pays the same whether you bring 10 or 100 people.
This offer is available only to the first 50 companies registering their teams. To get started, simply email our team to register your interest today!
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Increasing retention
We all know the thrill of landing a new customer, but here's a mind-blowing stat: increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95%. Yeah, you read that right.
So, why is retention such a big deal in software? Simply put, it's cost-effective, drives growth, and creates advocates. Acquiring new customers is expensive, but keeping existing ones is much cheaper. Happy customers tend to buy more, upgrade, and become your best marketers.
Now, how do we nail this retention game? There are a few ways…
First, ensure your customer success team becomes product experts. They should know your software inside out, building trust and solving problems faster. Next, define and measure success for each customer. Create a "success matrix" - what does winning look like for them?
Listening and adapting is crucial. Regular check-ins and feedback sessions are gold. Use them to improve your product and service. And always follow through - set clear expectations and deliver on your promises.
Foster connections between customers, and they'll feel more invested in your ecosystem. Remember, customer success isn't just a department—it's a company-wide mindset. From C-suite to development, everyone plays a role in keeping customers happy and sticky.
Now, I've got three challenges for you to move the needle when it comes to retention:
- Audit Your Retention: Take a hard look at your customer retention rates. Are they where you want them to be? If not, identify one area where you can improve in the next 30 days.
- Learn from the Best: Reach out to a SaaS company you admire and ask about their retention strategies. What can you adapt for your own business?
- Empower Your Team: Schedule a cross-functional meeting to discuss how each department can contribute to customer retention. Remember, it's everyone's responsibility!
These may seem like small things to do, but if we can increase our profits by as much as 95% – I’d say it’s well worth the effort!
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That’s it. We quit. All of us. Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary had recently been in negotiations with Annapurna founder and billionaire Megan Ellison to spin the gaming segment off as its own company. However, Ellison eventually pulled out of negotiations, at which point Gary resigned. Almost 30 other individuals, including division co-heads Deborah Mars and Nathan Vella, as well as the entire remaining staff of Annapurna Interactive, joined him. I guess its true that people leave a job because of their bosses…
Who knew AI could be enlightening? Google announced the release of Illuminate, an experimental technology that uses AI to foster learning by turning scholarly articles into audio content. You give the tool a PDF document from arXiv, and it generates a discussion between two AI-generated voices that’s reminiscent of a podcast episode. The tool is currently optimized for computer science topics, and Google plans to expand it to other topics. It’s what you’d get if you combined CliffsNotes and your favorite computer science podcast.
It’s A/B tests all the way down. If you’ve ever wanted to follow up on one A/B test with another but were put off by the work involved, there may now be a tool for you. Keak automatically generates variations of content likely to have an outsized impact on your website conversion rate, such as headlines, copy, and calls to action. The tool then automatically launches A/B tests between your original and the new variations it generated, splitting traffic between your initial content and the variations two at a time. When tests reach statistical significance, Keak saves the results and feeds them into your own AI model to fine-tune future variations. The tool continues these tests until you pause them, theoretically leading to hyper-optimized content (although probably not just the right shade of blue.)
You can’t spell saifety without AI. Wait… A controversial California bill that would set a new bar for AI regulation in the United States has cruised its way to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk despite heavy opposition from some corners of the tech industry. The bill passed both houses of California’s legislature with wide margins and now awaits a signature or veto from the governor by the end of the month. If passed, it would mandate that certain large AI models—above a set cost and size threshold—would have to adopt a regimen of safety steps, like building in a killswitch, undertaking annual audits, and other rules subject to a new regulatory board set up by the bill.
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