How To Determine Whether the Competition is Killing Your Strategy (ProductCamp Boston 2016)
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One of the more challenging duties of a software product management professional is evaluating the competitive landscape of the marketplace and determining what to do about it. In this session, we will look at three critical ways that your competition is undermining your product strategy and shortening the lifespan of your product. We will fight back by introducing a model for analyzing the competition that allows the making of strategic decisions based on your playbook, rather than theirs. About Russ Halliday Russ is a software industry veteran with over 20 years' experience under his belt. With a passion and long history in product and corporate strategy, Russ likes to use his knowledge and experience to help software companies develop and execute winning strategies to bring better products to the marketplace, faster. He founded Hallidar Consulting Limited to share that expertise and to help develop the software product management discipline.
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How To Determine Whether the Competition is Killing Your Strategy (ProductCamp Boston 2016)
- 1. HOW COMPETITORS KILL YOUR STRATEGY AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
- 2. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
- 3. WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING HERE? COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
- 4. COMPETITIVE INNOVATION MODEL Game- Changer RevolutionaryEvolutionaryCommodity COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
- 5. THE COMPLETED MODEL COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
- 6. GREAT – SO NOW WHAT? The model exists to help you decide how you want to compete, and to see how people are competing with you Begin with a subjective analysis Refine by studying the behaviour of key competitors going back a few years Use it to help assess your strategy, not build your backlog Continue to evolve the model with more objective measures over time COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
- 7. TO SUMMARIZE Look at competitive analysis as a way to help determine how you want to compete, not dictate what to build Where you are on the curve versus your competition can tell you How likely you are to be disrupted Whether you are throwing worse money after bad by engaging in a feature war Playing to your company’s strengths Advancing your company’s mission COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
- 8. THANK YOU! @RUSSHALLIDAY HTTP://HALLIDAR.COM COPYRIGHT (C) 2016 HALLIDAR CONSULTING LIMITED
Editor's Notes
- My name is Russ Halliday, and I have been a product management professional for most of my 20+ year career. What I’m going to talk about today is an area of product management that I struggled with over my career and that peers and colleagues of mine have had equal troubles with, which is competitive analysis. When I first started in Product Management, competitive analysis was one of my first tasks - I did it very poorly
- How many people here have done or do competitive analysis from time to time? How many people wind up with a list or grid of their features vs. yours? Competitive analysis almost always starts by asking the right question – what are my competitors doing How many people have been in a sales campaign where a prospect says “if you just had this feature like your competitor, I’d buy?” So, we forget that the purpose of competitive analysis is really to understand the landscape in which we’re competing… but, more often as not, as product managers, the results of competitive analysis (ours or someone else’s) hits us right here… … in our backlog and roadmap. Very often, the pressure comes from the c-suite or we implicitly assume that the competition “has it right” and we begin chasing taillights.
- I can’t stress this enough – this is undermining your strategy in a number of ways, all of them costly Code Bloat – every year, it costs about 20% more to put the same number of features into your product as went in the year before. Are you SURE you want to pay the compound interest on this feature for years to come? Some of you will likely have heard the TED Talk by Simon Sinek or read his book “Start with why”. Many more of you will have been to Pragmatic Marketing courses and understand what distinctive competence means. In short, people don’t just buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Are you SURE you want to be building something your competitor has that plays to their strengths and mission, rather than yours? Killing differentiation between your product and the competitions serves to commoditize your product in the eyes of the buyer. You dilute your value and reinforce in the market’s eyes that you are an interchangeable piece with your competitors. This is where innovation comes to die, and it isn’t long before you are competing on price alone. Bad news. In software commoditization is expensive due to lifecycle management costs