How do you think about your roadmap and overcoming a competitor’s differentiation when they are just so much further ahead?

It’s important to know your competition, but it’s equally important not to obsess over what they’re doing at a feature level. You should never aim for a feature vs. feature battle with competitors. The focus, instead, should be on the problems you’re solving for your users and what’s most important to them.

In order to have productive conversations with your team around where to focus, ensure you are aligned on answers to these questions:

1. Who are we targeting? What segment, industry, persona?
2. What do they care about?
3. What are they doing / using today?
4. What are their biggest problems?
5. What is our north star metric? Pick one. Retention? New customer acquisition? Revenue? Entering a new market?

For question #1 - Collaborate with product marketing and research on this one. Your answer here can change after you get answers to questions 2-5.

For questions #2 and #3 – I recommend investing heavily in research. Do not outsource this to the research team, have everyone involved in product development part of this process (PM, Eng, UX). Get out in the field, meet with your users, understand them, watch them in action every week. You will quickly start seeing what your competitors may be missing and an opportunity to leapfrog.

For question #4 – There are 2 exercises I’ve outlined in another answer that can help ground you and your team in differentiation and solving problems that matter to your users (‘What Sucks?’ and ‘User Value Mapping’).

For question #5 – Make sure you are explicitly aligned with leadership around what your answer to this question is. You can’t do everything. Pick one metric.

Disruption happens often. And it doesn’t happen because a company took the time to build all the features of an incumbent. It happens because a product zigs when everyone else is zagging. You focus on something the incumbents have forgotten about, or haven’t seen as a problem yet. This takes market research, insight, foresight, knowing your users and focus.

While it is important to care about your competitors to understand your own market position, DO NOT MAKE THEM THE FOCUS.

What should be your focus? Your customers. Their problems. Their needs, their asks, their feedback. 

Think of your roadmap like a budget of your resources, the way you would a household budget. Break down the budget by importance. 

For a product that has been out in the market a bit, I break down my ideal roadmap budget into the following percentages:

50% feature enhancements

20% net new features

15% compliance/security improvements

15% tech debt improvements/automation

I think this same budget can be applied to brand new products as well. It's important to nail down the features that matter MOST to a customer before adding more.

For a brand new product coming out of stealth mode, however, I may want to tweak this a bit:

80% net new MVP features

20% security/compliance/automation 

Did you notice that nowhere on this budget did I write "competitor influence"? Competitors help me understand the misalignment between how I think I'm doing vs. how I'm actually doing, or how I perceive myself vs. how customers perceive me. It's a reality check, but not a direct influence on my roadmap. I ALWAYS go back to customers to help course correct if I identify a misalignment in those perceptions.

Looking at a long list of competitors’ features as a catchup list can definitely be daunting. This is a futile race because while you are playing catchup, the competitor will continue to keep moving ahead. Instead, turn this into an asset by looking at the adoption/usage of your competitor's features by customers. We all know not all features are created equal; leverage the incumbent customer base, and get insights into which features are used the most by customers. It's also important to use this information as one input source in addition to your own customer, and market research to determine your company roadmap plan.