Competitive Exploits
Our marketing team just put together at fantastic competitive analysis for some top products in a space we are going to be aggressively pursuing. The major thing I look for in a competitive analysis is how easy it is for me to extract exploits.
I need to be able to read through the analysis, no matter what the format is, and be able to say, “competitor A doesn’t do x, y, and z as well as we do” for each company in the block. There are a multitude of different ways more deeper analysis and strategic planning can be completed (read: SWOTs), but, for time-sensitive stuff where you want the data and it needs to make it easy to verify market data and allow you to find weaknesses in what’s already out there, that’s what rocks.
There isn’t a specific art to it either. In order to do it correctly and well, you must be intimately familiar with your not only the core competencies of your product, but also your company as a whole.
Really, all you want to do is jot down bullet points that are geared towards getting some cross-functional folks (namely product mgmt and marketing) on board with making sure the messaging to clear, and functionality is clear when applicable, to win over the existing user’s of product’s that are probably feeling the pain of using them.
How are you working to find out how your products can solve the pain of your user’s better than your competitors?
June 8th, 2007 at 3:48 am
Two things should be clear when one wants to understand the competition.
1. Customers : For given segment of interest, are customers adequately served? Are they under or over served or not served at all? In what direction is the customer preferance likely to evolve over time? (Read : Seeing Whats Next).
2. Competition : How are they serving the segment now with respect to customer expection & w r t the direction of product evolution & customer preferance evolution.
When making investment prioritization, it is important to see how many difficult technology problems each competitor must solve in order to stay in the trajectory of customer preferance evolution. If such difficult problems are less, be sure the product gets commoditized very soon. This the time when you look at cost levers rather than feature levers.