Balancing Customer Focus and Market Awareness
Lessons learned in analyzing the competition through the eyes of the customer
Picture this: You're in a strategy meeting, sharing your product roadmap, when suddenly someone blurts out, “But what about [Competitor X]? They just released [Feature Y]!” The room falls silent, and all eyes turn to you.
As product managers, we often find ourselves caught in a delicate tug-of-war between focusing on our customers and keeping an eye on the competition.
This was crystallized for me a few years ago after a roadmap session, when an engineering leader posed a question that stopped me in my tracks: “Do we spend too much time talking about competitors?” This sparked reflection on my part; I needed to do some diagnosis and examine how much I was letting the competitive landscape drive my decision making.
As the famous Flannery O’Connor quote says, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
With a few years of life behind me since I got that question, and through the clarity that writing provides, read on for lessons from the trenches — Principles and real life learnings on how to think about the competition.
1. Stay closer to your customers than your competitors
Because your toughest “competitor” is often just pen, paper, and process.
Before any deep conversation on competitors, it must be said out loud: For every glance towards a competitor, take two towards your customer.
When you do, you’ll often find your customers spend exponentially less time thinking about your product and competitors than you do — Typically, customers are just trying to get through their day with whatever tool works best. Refreshing dose of humility. 😉
As a product person, especially in SaaS, your competitor set is incomplete without alternatives. It’s easy to get myopic about the latest fundraise or press release. In most cases, the majority of the market is using the proverbial spreadsheet though — not the latest SaaS product.
When I co-founded a startup in the home remodeling market, we spent significantly more time studying the whiteboards in the contractors’ offices and riding with them in their trucks to job sites, than obsessing over (who we thought were) competitors. We built our apps around their human processes.
Particularly around the pre-MVP and pre-product market fit stage, don’t waste your energy on who you think might be a competitor (it will change ten times as you pivot towards PMF fit anyway); you’ll win by being a student of the problem and spending those calories on your future customers. As you sort product market fit, your competitor set will become more clear and you’ll need to address that — but earn your way there through the customer problem in that early stage, first.
2. Find Your Anchor in Crisis
Write down your product strategy. Share it often. Revisit the reasoning. Change when necessary.
The Mike Tyson quote is fitting: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Have you been in situations where it’s felt like a punch…after punch after punch? Stress and anxiety grow with every lost sale or competitor announcement. Finger pointing, charged questions, and your conviction wanes.
Breathe. These are the moments where memories are short and emotions are high. Lean in. You must revisit The Why: The product strategy, which describes the path ahead. It should instill you and your team with calm confidence.
At sea, an anchor serves as stability. It prevents drift. And, an anchor isn’t permanent.
Therein lies the beauty of product leadership: Steadfast conviction anchored in sound strategy, blended with instinctual discernment to know when it’s time to pick up the anchor and change course. The former should be your default; the latter is an option that must be used smartly and sparingly — you have limited chances to change direction without your team losing trust.
Rewind all the way back to 2014. I had joined Atlassian and was focused on HipChat, the OG of workplace collaboration and chat.
During my time there, we witnessed a massive rise in competition. Chat was the battleground — Microsoft, Slack, Cisco, and loads of smaller players were all fighting for knowledge workers. Full page ads and billboards everywhere.
As we started on our journey to launch a new collaboration product, Stride, we stayed anchored in our strategy and our take on differentiation in a claustrophobic market:
A deep understanding of team workflows — discuss, decide, act
Video communication — nuances like raising your hand and seamlessly moving from chat to video
Focus mode — get back to actual work
The power and breadth of the Atlassian ecosystem
Our purpose and strategy was clear, which let the team focus on execution.
3. Stop Ruminating, Do Something
Funnel emotional reactions into productive strategic thinking.
Especially if you are in crisis mode, even the most measured, objective competitor observations can devolve into obsessive speculation — That’s when you land in dread (“They’re going to crush us!”), or envy (“Why didn’t we ship that?”), or even prideful dismissiveness (“That’s garbage — We’re better.”). All emotional reactions, all potentially quite dangerous.
Depending on your company stage, spend just enough time to get objective, measured awareness, and then find a productive outlet to take action, when necessary. Stop ruminating; Do something.
During my time at H-E-B (a $38B retailer and the best grocery store in the world), the leadership team set time aside each year for an exercise called “War Games.” It was a structured, proactive exercise that allowed us to think creatively and examine our strategy through different lenses by role playing across the market and competitive landscape. I don’t recommend an early stage SaaS company invests like this, but for a very mature retailer in highly competitive geographical markets operating on thin margins, it was time well spent. Lessons learned during those exercises were often referred to, and there was a playbook in place when competitors made moves.
4. Share with Context
Don’t be lazy; share news with your take.
In my early years as a PM, I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I was often guilty of racing to be the first to share a juicy press release about a competitor. Embarrassingly, I would share with no context, no hot take — just wanted to be the first to stir the pot. 🤦♂️
There’s no prize for First Person To Share Big News. The job as a product person is to synthesize, distill, and focus on signal — not create more noise.
Such a simple thing, but now, I never share a link without some framing and bulleted takeaways. Why?
It forces me to really crystalize how I think about the content — crisp writing is evident of clear thinking! I don’t want to share anything I have not digested and have at least half-formed thoughts opinions on — don’t be lazy; read it, have a take, and share it to open up dialogue.
And it helps my team understand how they should be thinking about it and keeps reactions and emotions within bumper lanes, rather than wandering into extreme dismissiveness or even depression.
5. UX Opportunities — Copycat vs Contrarian
As you examine competitors, discern UX opportunities to strategically align or boldly diverge.
Imagine a customer switching to your product from a competitor — Familiarity breeds comfort and unlocks quicker time to value, while uniqueness drives loyalty.
What should feel familiar and comfortable? What should feel unique? Your new customer might have a mental model; craft your experience with that context, strategically aligning where it makes sense.
During my time at FullStory, we invested heavily in expanding into product analytics — a very crowded and understood market. As our teams did discovery, one of the considerations was feature names. Things like “Heatmaps,” “Dashboards,” “Funnels,” “Retention Charting” were all relatively understood by the market, and we wanted to optimize time to value as new and existing customers expanded their usage of FullStory into the quantitative. We largely chose to align with standard words, while putting more mental calories into the unique execution of those features.
For your customer: What should feel unique and bold? Spend time leaning into impactful differentiation opportunities around UX, copy, and putting a unique twist on your product experience. The goal isn't to be different for the sake of being different, but to solve user problems in a familiar, yet unique way.
6. Positioning and Pricing Strategy
Map the landscape through the eyes of your customer.
Lastly — For growth-stage or mature SaaS products, you have a new challenge around positioning, pricing, and product strategy, and the competitor landscape plays a role.
Unfortunately, your more thorough analysis is only as good as your customer’s perception. Meaning, you’ll might find that the perfect quadrants in your slide deck don’t map to how a real human thinks!
Your own analysis of the space might be different than how a customer talks about it. Go listen. Ask them how they would describe your product to a co-worker, or what alternatives they were considering before using your product. Does the customer’s perception of the your competitors match your own?
Then, understand how customers perceive your product's value relative to competitors. Minimally, get clarity on what customers are paying and how they’re buying the product (sales-led, community-led, etc). Use this insight to craft pricing tiers and feature bundles that clearly communicate your unique value proposition. Remember, your goal isn't just to compete on price, but to create a compelling narrative about why your product is worth what you're charging — and for whom.
Go buy April Dunford’s book “Obviously Awesome,” and read her newsletter. Don’t stop reading until you have a strong grasp on positioning and what that should mean to you as a product person in the context of competitors.
Bonus tip: If you have a product marketing team, it goes without saying: Collaborate!
Bottom line: Depending on your product’s stage, take regular, objective glances to understand how a customer perceives your product to help guide your product strategy.
Great advice, Evan. Yes, it certainly is tempting (and unproductive) to quickly share the latest competitor news without forming an opinion! I disagree with one part of your post, though... Publix is the best grocery store in the world.