Product Differentiation

The most common mistake is to not think about it at all. It can be so challenging to get a product built and shipped at your company that Product Managers naturally become very internally focused. They have dependencies to manage across other teams, they have timeline pressure from leadership, there are technical challenges to work around, etc. On top of it all, most Product Managers don’t engage their Product Marketing counterpart until they are almost done building the thing. This should be avoided at all costs – your Product Marketing partner is key in helping guide and shape creat...

Product differentiation != new features. New features can enhance differentiation, but these are not the same thing. For example, product differentiation can be predominantly delivered in the go-to-market if a product's "see-try-buy" motion is just inherently better than everything else available. The differentiation there is in the trial experience and ease of transaction - not necessarily in the latest feature.

Don’t forget about marketing, positioning and acquisition of customers as a key part in your differentiation strategy.  It’s easy for Product Managers to solely focus on the bits and bytes of how the product works once someone’s in it, but if you cannot acquire or entice new customers - you need to move your differentiation focus further up the funnel.  Is your product too hard to set up or use? Does it take a long time for users to see value in your product?  It’s key to partner with sales, product marketing, support and solution engineering to get the full picture here.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage. 1. Product attributes are insufficient and can be replicated by competitors with enough investment and determination 2. Pricing models and all their nuances can be undercut. Customers' willingness to pay may be negated by the next recession or evaporate when a new shinier, cooler competitor product arrives 3. Human capital, though harder to build up and retain, can still be hired away from you. Everybody has a price. So, what makes for sustainable competitive advantage? Leveraging economics of scale but more so economies of scope, driving flywheel type...

I'll keep this one rather brief. I find that some product managers do not always listen to their customers and their problems as the guiding light for improving and differentiating their products. Instead, they fall in love with a shiny new piece of technology that may not be solving a critical problem.

A common mistake exec teams make is focusing on output and forgetting about outcomes. Product teams present roadmaps to execs and once they’ve shipped a thing, they tell them it’s complete and move onto the next. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what’s on your roadmap or what you’ve successfully shipped if you’re not moving the needle in the outcomes you care about. Questions to align on with your team to help you get there: 1. Do we have clearly defined desired outcomes for your team? 2. Do we have alignment on these outcomes with leadership / execs? 3. Do we have a way to ...

If your exec team has not articulated a credible product strategy it could be that they don't know how or they feel that they cannot invest at this time due to much bigger near term issues or constraints. Consider what that might be saying about the viability of the company either way, and a potential switch. If you are still compelled, one way is to try using the voice of the customer: ie compile direct feedback on where your customers want to see your company go to continue being customers and couple this with a competitive strategy comparison.

I love this question. The answer is: it depends on the exec team and how they are motivated, whether they are answering to private investors or public shareholders, etc.  But - to put it simply - find someone on your exec staff who both 1) trusts you/your vision and sell them the vision and 2) is trusted by the rest of the executive team and can sell your vision or has the budget authority to invest. What do you need to sell it? A business case. I think of a business case as satisfying the inputs to the following equation:  "why should we do this" + "what do we need to do" + "how m...

I used to be a product marketer. My ideal working relationship is to view product marketing as my key partner in product development, launch, and iteration. We are both stewards of the product success. I try to involve product marketing into the very beginning stages of product development - they help me amplify the voice of the customer, help me find reference customers by launch, fine tune messaging, speak to industry analysts educating them on the new product, enable sales and customers on the product benefits and messaging. PMMs also conduct competitor messaging/positioning analysis,...

Start by analyzing why this might be happening. It’s a key signal that shouldn’t be ignored, and needs further digging to understand what’s behind it. Is there a misperception of your brand? Is there a misunderstanding of the product offering? Are you missing features? Is there a lack of awareness of the company / offering? Consider conducting interviews with users and salespeople to get a better understanding of the misperception. If you can diagnose what exactly is behind this miscategorization, then you can start identifying who to work with and what to do to resolve it. It will a...

This can be a very frustrating situation to be as a product manager. This situation tells me you work in a market that hasn't matured to the point of clear nuance. The culprit could be either a product problem OR a marketing problem. The reason this can be frustrating is your product is being held to a set of standards it shouldn't be, and therefore customers get disappointed - its own form of death spiral if something doesn't change. It sounds like one or more things could be happening here:  1. Customers haven't started to view the market in subsegments yet - they still view their p...

There are 2 exercises I use to evaluate bringing differentiation into the products I'm building. 1. What sucks? 2. User value mapping Where they originated I came up with these frameworks in collaboration with Paul Pedrazzi (SVP, Salesforce) while we were working on a 0 → 1 product for small business. We repeatedly re-visited the artifacts of these exercises throughout the product development lifecycle. What sucks? What the outcome will be A list of the Top 3 issues for your target user. How to do it 1. It’s as simple and cathartic as it sounds: get in a room with a diverse...

While I don't use an existing framework specifically for product differentiation, I do use a variety of inputs to determine what lever to pull or what decision to make. These inputs can be found in the answer to the question, "What are the most important inputs to take into consideration when thinking through product differentiation?" Other frameworks I do use:  1. Geoffrey Moore's Positioning Statement Template in his book, Crossing the Chasm: "For (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity), the (product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key be...

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 bigg...

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 improvemen...

There are several inputs I think about when considering product differentiation: 1. Specific target customer - There are many types of customers in a market. Who are you serving? Try to narrow your focus as far as you can to understand the specific problems faced by this customer to be as tailored to their needs as possible. Has a particular customer type been ignored or underserved in the market? If so, why? What value are they seeking but not able to find with existing products? 2. Specific value delivered - The inherent "why" customers use your product. Regardless of how many feature...

While it may be tempting to get sucked into feature by feature wars and spar through marketing communications it will not yield much for whoever (you or the competito) lacks sources of Sustainable Competitive Advantage. see related answer on what those are, not to be confused with Competitive Advantages

This is a tale as old as time. There are many ways to approach this. I have seen vendors heavily bid on the AdWords of their competitor names and promote alternative solutions (trials or marketing content). I have seen vendors who are challengers in mature markets create "Us vs. Them" web pages or blogs that outline the differences (according to the vendor publishing the info) what the major differences are. And, I have seen third-party research or analyst evaluations heavily promoted that rank vendors according to specific criteria (contracted by the vendor or annually conducted created...

I love this question. Through my work at both Salesforce and Shopify this is something that comes up regularly because of our platform and healthy partner ecosystem.  1. Do the majority of my users need this? 2. Are there problems with the partner meeting the needs of users today? 3. Do we have the expertise and staffing to build this? 4. Would building this natively unlock new value, new opportunity or a new market? If the answers to questions 1-3 are yes, then it warrants a discussion with your team. The key question that decides the outcome here is #4.  Is it worthwhile for ...