I wrote an article for the latest issue of the Pragmatic Marketing monthly magazine on industry immersion – essentially, how to learn a new industry when you step in to manage a product within it. And then of course, keeping up to date with that industry and all of the data available to you.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
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I did an interview with Tom Grant over on the Heretech podcast.
Go and check it out and let me know what you think!
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Doing competitive analysis can always seem like such a daunting task – but I’ve always found it to be a bit cathartic. It’s easy to start to believe that your competitors have some great, secret, uber functionality that’s going to let them take over the world. While that could be the case, chances are it’s not.
You really want to simply get a sense of where other folks in your space are at. To do that, there are a number of things you’ll want to create and deliver – but it all starts out with picking the companies with which you are competing.
This really demands input from a management team, or senior folks. You want to make sure you get a good cross-section of companies in your space to evaluate and look at – and most important, gather some solid business intelligence on.
I always give the advice that picking too many will only lead to analysis paralysis. Take 3-5 companies, run your analysis, and monitor them on an ongoing basis. Don’t try to track everyone – this will only end-up causing you problems even if it seems doable.
If you are managing B2B products, try to get some input on who you are losing deals to / winning deals over from your Sales team. They should have a good sense of the names that keep coming up over and over. Make sure you at least check out those companies to validate, and ensure they are in fact matched pretty closely to you strategically.
Get buy-in on the competitive list from your management team to make sure you are on the right track, and then start to layout how you will analyze them.
Typically, the items I keep coming back to are:
I step through each one of these items in more detail throughout a series of posts and provide some templates for you to use as well. In the meantime, get working to identify who your competitors are, and why!
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Change is on the horizon.
I have decided to leave PlanetEye.
In candid discussions with the CEO, it became clear the company is going to benefit from the ability to quickly transact – in essence, move from sales directly to development for quick, successful client implementations.
The product is definitely ready to support this approach, and as such, organizational needs have changed. The company needs to be able to rapidly execute on opportunities they are clearly positioned to win. As such, Jonah (the CEO) has given me a fantastic opportunity to pursue the next step in my career.
I’ve had a great time working with the talented and fast-moving team. We’ve built a great product in PlanetEye.com, and I wish them nothing by continued success.
I have a few things in front of me, but am taking some time to figure out what it is I really want to do. Of course, I’m definitely open to ideas, so drop me a line: abullied@gmail.com.
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A great presentation on requirements from Nainill Chheda. I’ve not seen this before, and it’s been up on Slideshare for about 4 months. Check it out – you won’t be sorry (hat tip, Stewart Rogers).
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