How do you leverage Competitive Intelligence to influence the Product Roadmap?

Competitive Insight impacts the roadmap in 2 ways.
1. It can be used to identify competitive strengths and weaknesses. That insight can be used to steer the roadmap while weighing up what is important to address and what can be ignored.

2. CI can als be used for pricing and packaging decisions. Are you a price leader or leaving money on the table? how are other providers their terms of service and payment conditions. subject to where entitlements are tracked (in the app or the billing system), this could also be used for roadmap items

I would first interview some sales reps, customer success managers, and customers to validate and possibly support the competitive intelligence received with data and quotes. This research will help you gain more depth on the situation and build a comprehensive case to influence the product roadmap and address the competitive threat more strategically. Here are some things to look for in your research:

• The competitor could be solving customer pain points using a feature that is either nonexistent or not highlighted in your product. In either situation, consider balancing showing feature parity with making the case for long-term innovation.

• Look for win/loss stories, changes in market share, shifting inquiries with analysts, changes in press mentions, and other quantitative markers to help prioritize new development work. Your CI team might already have a lot of this.

• Identify if there are any opportunities to shift GTM strategies and tactics to address the intel. This could include messaging and pricing/packaging changes or more focused sales enablement for a particular solution or in a specific geography. 

In my opinion, competitive intelligence is one of the most impactful ways product marketing can help inform product roadmaps and ensure your company has a differentiated and unique offering in the market. By digging into what competitors exist, what their value props are, what feature sets they offer, how much they charge, etc. competitive intelligence can become a critical resource for informing what to build, why to build it, who you're building for and how to message it. Plus, doing competitive research can often be done in the absence of a large budget. You just need to have time, focus and ability to prioritize.

Regardless of the stage of the product, the planning process, breadth of the competitive set, competitive intelligence can be incredibly informative and thought-provoking. When approaching competitive intelligence, I focus on the following outcomes:

• Identifying product features amongst our competitors and similar offerings that are tablestakes

• Clearly painting a picture of what choices exist for customers today to inspire the product team to think outside the box on how to stand out in a sea of competition

• Leverage competitive insights to inform a differentiated and unique value prop

When thinking about how to get started with competitive research I'd recommend the following steps:

1) Identify what customer needs and problems you're trying to solve for. For example, are you trying to build a new shopping platform that taps into the resources and tools of a social network? Or are you looking to build a hyperlocal communication platform for local communities?

2) Identify the competitor set you want to research. Dont forget to think outside the box beyond the obvious competitors. For example when thinking about building communication tools for a youth sports management platform, you should probably look beyond your direct competitors and include communication tools like GroupMe or WhatsApp since those are popular modes of communication and planning for youth sports teams.

3) Next, narrow down the core inputs you are looking to better understand. Do you have a feature set in mind that you want to compare competitors to? Are there key problems you are looking to solve for and how do each of the competitors solve for those needs?

4) Thoroughly document your findings in a easy to digest table to compare competitors across different data points. Take plenty of screenshots and videos of the competitive set's UI and marketing messaging. Document open questions along the way as well that you need to come back to answer and specifically call out things that are out of scope for so that you avoid scope creep. It's really easy to go down a neverending rabbithole when doing competitive intelligence so it's important to stay focused and prioritize what things you want to dig into.

5) Lastly, summarize your findings and recommendations on next steps for you and your product team and be sure to share your work broadly with not just your product partners but with leadership and the cross-functional team.

Leveraging competitive intelligence deeply enhances your credibility in Product Roadmap conversations. However, competitors and the operating environment could also evolve and change. For example:

• Your key competitor could pivot to a different product focus area.

• Your company could move to a different segment, e.g. B2B vs B2C or Enterprise vs Mid-market.

• Your industry or regulatory body could shift and change to a new direction.

• New competitors could move into your space.

While it is key to follow competitive moves via LinkedIn posts, website updates, or PR, it is as important to assess your key competitors continually. Signs of a shift could be who your prospects cite in key deal conversations, with example impacts being who you compare with as key competitors on LinkedIn and consider for Google ads and search campaigns.