At this rate, we’ll have to publish an ebook soon to discuss the multiple aspects of research in product management so that you’re not hopping from article to article when you need the information. What do you think?

Ok. Let’s get into it.

We started discussing competitive analysis (competition research) here. Should I do a recap? Maybe a short one. No point repeating stuff you already know right? Plus, you can always do a quick review of the earlier articles. so I’ll just highlight a few things to refresh your memory or in case you missed it –

1. Competition research is important for your product to even have a chance to succeed. You need to know who your competition is and what they’re doing to gain the market share you so desperately need.
2. There are different types of competitors, and you need different strategies to address them.
3. There are multiple ways to identify your competitors. We highlighted five (5) of them including google search, actively listening to your customers and prospects, using social media, checking app stores, and leveraging existing research.
4. One you’ve identified your competitors, you should focus on seven (7) key aspects to get useful information about them. These are their vision, their USP and key offerings, their brand identity, their SWOT, their team, their infrastructure, their customers. Other aspects that can help you have a holistic view of your competitors include their pricing, staying power (how large is their war chest?), revenues, workplace culture, marketing efforts, metrics such as CAC and LTV and a host of others.

I’d recommend you also take a quick look at the first article in the research series where we discussed why data and research are important to product managers.

So now that we’ve identified competitors and categorised them, the next step is to find information about them around the seven (7) aspects we highlighted.

How to find data about your competitors.

There are several sources for finding data about these 7 key aspects of your competitors we highlighted above.

1. Company websites. The first and easiest place to find information about a company or product is their website. This is where they put their best feet forward (well, in most cases). You’ll find information such as (a.) their vision, mission and core values. Vision statements are futuristic, and they tell you where they see their product going. Strategy is informed by vision and tactics are informed by their mission. By dissecting their vision and mission statements, you’ll learn how they think, how they want their customers to perceive them, and how they measure the success of their product or organisation (for multi-product organisations). (b.) customer reviews. You’ll want to take these with a pinch of salt however since they’ll only put great reviews on their website, but this is a good starting point to understanding how their best customers see their products. (c.) their user experience. Your experience of their website tells you what they focus on. Are they UI focused or UX focused? The experience you have from their website will most likely be the same you get with their product(s).
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2. Product reviews. You definitely want to teardown your competitors’ products. Get in there. Use their products, get to know their products intricately. You can only improve on what you know. Remember to put yourself in your customers’ shoes when you explore your competitors’ products. Your aim is to figure out how they (competitors) solve your customers’ problems. This is how you get an edge over them.
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3. Customer feedback. Find out what users say about your competitors. Keep up with social media and app stores especially. Dig deeper than just the comment or review, find the people behind the comments. Do they fit your defined personas? Are there new user groups you hadn’t originally included in your persona definitions?
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4. News. Keeping tabs on news (and gossip) about your competitors, your industry at large and the entire market is very important when trying to stay ahead of the curve. You don’t want to be launching features that some event that happened a week ago has rendered useless.
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5. Marketing channels. Their social media channels and other touchpoints tell you more than how many followers they have. Follow your competitors. Engage with their content so that algorithms suggest them and similar companies / products to you. Engage with their followers, you’ll not only get information about the competitors, you’ll also get conversion opportunities!
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Now that we’ve identified what data you should be looking for and where to find them, let’s talk about how to collect, curate and use the data.

How to collect, curate and use data from competitor research

There are several tools and templates that have been developed over time so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. However, beyond just giving you a list of tried and trusted templates, it would help to evaluate these methods from the perspective of intended outcomes. I always approach every aspect of product management with the product lifecycle in mind.

To successfully achieve competitive advantage, it’s important to identify your why. What are your preferred outcomes? Your outcome should be directly related to the stage of your product and your current positioning in the market.

We developed the model below that identifies the needs of a product through the different stages of the product lifecycle. Read more about our PM vs PLC model.

Understanding what your product needs at its current lifecycle stage helps to determine what to focus on during your competitive analysis.

PLC Stage: Development and Introduction

At this stage, your product is undergoing ideation, validation, creation and launch as seen in our product management framework above. Your team is working to validate the idea using different methods including delivering an MVP, launching to your target market and gaining early adopters. Your focus at this stage is awareness and adoption. You need people to use your product, give your feedback and become advocates.

So how does competitive analysis help you here? With data from your competitors, you can identify personas, use cases, features that add value, pricing, channels to reach your prospective users and a lot more.

Ideal templates for competitive analysis at development and introduction stage are high-level tools that focus on the top-level information characteristics and capabilities of your competitors.

1. SWOT Analysis. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This is a great way to evaluate your competitors from a holistic perspective with respect to the market you are playing in. This works best if you do a SWOT analysis for each of your top competitors, then compare to find similarities. The similarities help you identify common issues across your competitive landscape.
2. Competitive Landscape. This is a quadrant chart that helps you identify how you position in comparison with your competitors. It’s important to figure this out early in your PLC as your positioning determines how you articulate your USP, communicate your value to your customers and which competitors to focus on battling for market share.
3. Competitor Overview. This gives you a snapshot overview of your competitors along the key aspects we defined above. A great tool for this is the Product Canvas.
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PLC Stages: Growth and Maturity

At this stage, you are optimising your product. It is expected that you have found product-market fit and are now adapting to market needs.

Ideal templates for competitive analysis at growth stage are tools that focus on feature comparisons and customer feedback.

1. Product Reviews. Understanding your competitors’ product is one of the most effective ways of achieving competitive advantage.
2. Competitor scorecard tools. Once you’re familiar with their products, you are then able to incorporate tools such as Features Comparison, Kano Model, and Capabilities Matrix, BCG Matrix, G2 category Grid and a lot more.
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PLC Stage: Decline

At decline stage, you are evaluating what your product needs. Is it due for sunsetting or a pivot? At this stage, you’re basically back to ideation so the same tools and methods you used to achieve competitive advantage at introduction stage apply here.

Purpose-Driven Research: Before embarking on any form of research, it’s important to know your why. Why determines how and helps you tailor your focus to activities that generate impactful results.

Now that you have –

• identified your competitors,
• the right data to research and collect about them,
• where to get information about your competitors,
• how and when to collect this information,

The next step is to use the data you’ve collected to inform your product decisions and create competitive advantage for your product and organisation.

How to convert data into strategy

We introduced Michael Porter’s three strategies for achieving competitive advantage – cost leadership, differentiation and segmentation – here.

Deciding how to compete depends on a lot of inputs such as your company size, your war chest, your capabilities and the existing competitive landscape.

We discuss Product Strategy in detail in our course which teaches you everything you need to know about creating winning strategies for your product. Our Product Strategy course teaches you –

• how to collect the right data,
• how to convert the data to valuable information,
• how to leverage information to influence stakeholders,
• how to develop great strategies and actionable goals,
• and how to achieve competitive advantage by learning from real life successful product leaders.

Until now, our trainings have been on-demand and in closed sessions tailored to our clients' products but I've got good news!

We are working to open them up to everyone. Yayyy us!! You can secure your spot here. We like to have small classes for maximum impact.

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