Competitive Analysis Series – Feature Breakdowns

by Adam Bullied on Jul 15, 09

One of the hardest aspects of competitive analysis is to perform a detailed feature-by-feature breakdown of each of your identified competitors. This is much easier to do within a B2C space than B2B – simply because within B2B, you (more often than not) don’t have access to the products themselves to do the feature analysis.

With B2C products, you can either a) get access to them to analyze for free or b) pay a fee to get a license to analyze them. On the B2B side, you are probably going to have to deal with sales calls, trials, demos, and other avenues in order to get the data you require.

I’ve put together a simple Google spreadsheet you can use as a guide / template to get started.

First off, try to group the features as best you can – and really, you are looking for features that you have and competitors don’t and vice versa. Knowing what competitors have that your product doesn’t (and keeping up-to-date on it) can help you make some of your prioritization decisions.

Each feature can be categorized in the following ways:

  • Yes – this means the company has the feature
  • No – this means the company does not have the feature
  • On Roadmap – this means the company has the feature on their roadmap
  • In Development – this means the company is working on the feature
  • N/A – sometimes, certain features are just not applicable to the company

Again, this level of detail is going to be very hard to get for B2B companies. However, during your travels (and when your sales reps come up against competitors) it will start to get filled in.

That’s really about it – no need to make this more complicated or anything – it really needs to be a simple, current spreadsheet of features showing how your product stacks up against the competition.

This shouldn’t be a singular tool to drive your decision-making and/or prioritization efforts; but it’s certainly a contributor. However, putting too much weight in the data this exercise yields may drive you to commoditize features for no real market reasons, so use your common sense.

Tagged as: analysis, competition, features, Management, market data, research, series, strategy

  • Pingback: Software Product Management » Blog Archive » Шаблон сравнения функций в конкурентном анализе

  • Gabriel Brigidi

    This is a very good tool for competitive analysis and benchmarking. And as you said, Adam, it is certainly more difficult to build it on a B2B scenario. In this case, some tools of competitive intelligence could be very useful.

    Another idea to complement this kind of analysis is to create a chart from the table you suggested, based on the Yes/No for each feature. Graphical elements are far more comprehensive than raw data tables, easing the communication inside the company.

    The idea is simple: to create a 2D chart, where the X-axis contains each feature considered on the analysis and the Y-axis contains the presence or not (Yes/No) for each one of them. One line should be draw for each company (competitor and yours). The chart can be enhanced by sorting the features by importance, for example, and by considering features the market needs but are uncovered.

    This kind of chart can be useful not only for communication, but also for defining a business strategy. It makes easier to identify “must-have” features that your company has or has not, and also to discover opportunities that are not covered by any competitor.

    There are many other ways to translate data into visual elements. This is only a contribution that I hope is useful for readers.

    Regards,

    Gabriel

  • http://writethatdown.com Adam Bullied

    Gabriel – I love the idea of turning this data in to a chart for
    easier communication. I agree that would go over very well for
    management / board of director presentations when communication
    product strategy and priorities.

  • Rune

    Great article. However, I can't access the spreadsheet

  • http://writethatdown.com Adam Bullied

    Thanks, Rune! Terribly sorry – I tried to re-publish it at the link above, which for reference is: http://bit.ly/Kespi. If that still doesn't work, drop me a line (abullied [at] gmail [dot] com) and I'll e-mail you the template directly.

    Thanks – and again, sorry for the trouble!

  • huang

Previous post:

Next post: