Jack Murray - BlogCompetitors for context, never direction969 words (approx 5 min)

A post I made a few years ago on Medium. Some of my thoughts have evolved on this topic, but the essence is still the same.

The best products don’t merely achieve feature parity with their competitors, they go above and beyond by deeply understanding, appreciating and addressing the problems and needs of their customers.

Think of your product competitors this way. If you’re a competitive runner in a marathon, it may be necessary to look at your competitors because you’re all in the same race. You have the same objective, same destination, same route and same ruleset. But in a product world, you and your competitors are actually running different races. You have different objectives, different destinations, different routes and different rulesets. The only commonality is you’re both running races.

Who are your customers?

Your competitors are not your customers, your customers are your customers. This is why the starting point must be deep insight into and appreciation of the problems and needs of your customers. They are the ones that will pay you to help them, and they are the ones that will keep you afloat. They are the ‘why’ behind your entire business or idea.

Product-market fit is a double-pan scale where both are sides are equal. You are trying to get the feature-set that is your product to equal the problems and needs your customers are willing to pay to have relieved. Deeply understanding and figuring out what things to put on each side of the scale is the job of a product manager. One part empathy, one part science, one part art, one part history, one part economics, one part vision, one part luck.

Over time your customers’ problems and needs and how much they’re willing to pay to have these relieved change. Good product managers watch for, deeply understand and try their best to account for these changes by altering what is on both sides of the scales. A great product strikes an equilibrium and is able to maintain or adjust to maintain this state over time.

Your competitors may well overlap with what you have on the customer side of your scales, but their product-market fit is ultimately an entirely different set of scales. Your competitors either do not care about you or are in a battle with you, trying to make you sink by addressing your common customers’ problems and needs better than you do. Such is the nature of competition — capitalism, the law of the jungle.

Always start with your customers — deeply understand their problems and needs. Your competitors are running a different race.

Don’t assume your competitors have it right

Following the above analogy, your competitors are an entirely different set of product-market fit scales. Their journey and what they choose to put on each side is a big unknown to you. You can make educated guesses but unless you are their product manager, you will be making a hell of a lot of assumptions.

You don’t know if the customers you have or are trying to have are the same as your competitors. You don’t know the market or type of customer they are targeting or trying to target. You don’t know their short and long-term strategies. You don’t know their silent stakeholders. You don’t know their limitations and constraints. You don’t know their finances and ROI needs. You don’t even know if the features they’re exposing to customers are actually valuable and relieving the problem or need they think their customers have. You haven’t seen their numbers, you don’t know their conversion, you don’t know their frictions. You don’t know a whole damn lot.

Highlighting these, it becomes obvious that looking too deeply at competitors for direction is pretty ridiculous. You’d just be operating on way too many assumptions. Most of all you don’t even know if your competitor has found or thinks they’ve found product-market fit — and even if you think you know they have, who’s to say that putting any of the same things on the product side of your scale will work for you? You have different, albeit perhaps overlapping or similar customers.

Looking for industry ‘requirements’ rather than features

Alright, alright. There are things your competitors all seem to have in common that are just so obvious that you must have in order for your product to float with a similar customer selection.

The thing is, if you understand and appreciate your customers’ problems and needs at a deep enough level these ‘requirements’ will surface on their own. If a potential customer runs you through their workaround for how they solve the problem or need now and if you creatively think about a solution, then the necessities will pop up anyway.

Your customers are buying something online? You need to support the payment methods they use to buy things online. Your customers want a frictionless way to purchase travel? You need to facilitate a smooth eCommerce shopping and checkout experience. Your customers are buying mobile phones, not computers now? You’d better focus on mobile development.

Industry trends and ‘requirements’ to compete in a market arise from the cumulative creative solutions businesses have used previously to relieve customers’ problems and needs. They are not requirements from out of nowhere, and they are only rarely because of some special status such as being a government regulation. In a hypothetical example of you being completely blind to your competitors, you can still be successful if you understand your customers deeply and address their problems and needs creatively enough.

Looking at your competitors should simply be to get a lay of the land, to get a feel and appreciation for the landscape that your customers live in, to walk a mile in your customers’ shoes.

Competitors for context, never direction.