A research minded Product Manager, if a competitor just launched a new product, they go out and talk to users right away: “what does this mean for you?”, “how does this fit into your life?” They’re looking for those opportunities to discover new things rather than sitting and saying “we need to get to feature parity with them right now”.

Because customers don’t really care about feature parity, everything is part of an experience, part of a journey, and Product Managers who excel at research are always proactively seeking out that new information, those new challenges and looking for ways to activate that before someone tells them to.

– Matt LeMay on The CORE connective skills of product management (podcast)

I like this framing of competition research as digging into the problems a competitor is trying to solve, rather than copying their implementation. The deeper thinking suggested here seems likely to turn up ways that your company can improve on the solution, make it your own, or perhaps even determine that this opportunity is not necessary or not a priority for your customers.

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