Chapter 5- Product Manager Guide to Competitive Analysis- Part 1

In the last post, we identified different types of competitors for our product idea. It's good that there are competitors available in the market. It means that the problem you are trying to solve via your product exists and someone has taken the pain to provide a solution for it.

Now its time to focus on our key competitors and see how they are performing. What areas they are doing great vs where they are lagging. What are their customers saying about the products and how happy are they with using them. What feature is winning hearts. How do the metrics look like and where is the room for improvement. How frequently are the features getting released and if customers are using new features. What is the focus in the upcoming release. How are their press mentions. Did they receive any new funding. How strong is their product team. All this can be broadly divided into 5 buckets

1. Design of the product

2. Size of their user base

3. Speed of their delivery

4. Brand

5. Product team

So, let's look at an example. I want to analyse 2 of my favorite blogs https://www.mindtheproduct.com/ and https://svpg.com/articles/ that I read very frequently. Please note that the numbers below may not be accurate. I am just showing this table as an example of competitive analysis:-

This is just a quick analysis to get some sense of competition as a whole. Just by looking at the comparison, I get an idea of how these blogs are performing against each other and where I should focus on for my blog to succeed. We have to look at the features list More to come in subsequent posts but in the meantime what key things you look in your competitors.