“We need a product that does X because our competitors have a product that does X”
“Our product needs feature Y because our competitors product has feature Y.”
It makes me want to cry.
Let me clear: building something because your competitors have it IS NOT A STRATEGY.
Neither is it a particularly good tactic.
Stop obsessing about your competitors and think about your customers.
I don’t doubt that your people are being told that customers are buying the competitor product because it has X or Y and I don’t doubt that some of your people feel that if you only matched the competitors feature for feature you would win but I just can’t see it myself.
For a start, is feature Y really the only thing loosing the sale? Are the products so well balanced that this one small thing is it? And is there really nothing that your product does better?
Try this simple experiment: tell the customer that feature Y will be delivered next month and see if they decide to buy yours there and then or find something else that makes the competition better.
Now lets suppose you decide to build Y. Before you make any plans ask yourself:
While you are building feature Y what are your competitors going to be doing?
Will they stand still or will they be adding feature Z?
And once they have feature Z will you need to play catch up?
Chances are that tomorrow you get to where you want to be (where your competitors are today) only to find your competitors have something else you don’t have either.
I’ll agree this is a good strategy if you have deliberately chosen to be a Fast Follower – you can play Android to your competitors iOS. Just make sure you know why your customers will choose your Android over the competitor iOS.
Will you be cheaper?
Or better?
Or will you bundle some other goodies with it?
Before you run to where your competitors are today ask yourself: where will your competitors be tomorrow?
If you still insist on building this feature you need to
- Make sure you do a much better job (easier to use, more intuitive, faster to produce results, better quality results, or some such)
- OR you need to do it fast and cheap so you can spend your precious resources on building something the competitor doesn’t have
- OR you being overwhelming resources to the table so you are going to stand a chance. Every day you delay the competitor gets further ahead, so don’t try half measures
A better approach is to find out what your customers actually need. Stop looking at the features, go back to first principles: what is the problem your customers face? what is the job they are attempting to make progress with?
How can you help your customers with this job?
How can you make them faster?
How can you help them achieve their work more cheaply? Or at better quality? – in fact, what do “better” and “quality” look like to them.
Someone – I honestly forget who – told me earlier this year that they wanted to catch-up with their competitor and overtake them.
One small flaw there: if you build features to match your competitors you can never overtake them because you won’t know what to build once you reach parity.
Put it another way, you add all the features they have today, and all the features they add while you are catching up. What do you build next? Until they build their next version (and recapture the lead) you don’t know what to build. And if you build something different you just lost feature parity.
So, go back and examine what your customers are using your tool for. Look at the job to be done, look at how your customers are doing their job and using your tool and work out for yourself how you can help customers do a better job.
Celebrate the difference, explain why you are better.
And please forget about matching the competition.
I’m old enough to remember the days when WordStar was fighting WordPerfect, AmiPro was fighting them both, and all were better than Microsoft Word. Adverts and magazine reviews would compare them feature to feature. Someone somewhere thought people bought word processors based on the number of features.
Then Microsoft launched Windows and everybody went over to Microsoft Word for Windows almost overnight.
Don’t focus on your competitors. Focus on your customers. Unfortunately that requires more work and some original thinking.
