How do you perform extensive competitive product research?

I’d clarify upfront what they are hoping to achieve with the exercise. Is it for internal knowledge? To publish competitive checklists on your website? What will it mean for them to know how your tech stacks up in the market? Clarifying and getting alignment on how the information will be used and what constitutes success upfront will help you hit the mark. I find it helpful to remind stakeholders that we should be evaluating the product and competitors through the lens of value, not feature che ...Read More

We all miss the mark here. I'm not even sure I would trust a PMM that says they don't struggle with this! You can stack the deck though, to show that you're exploring every possible avenue:  1. Consider a competitive monitoring solution like Crayon. I've used them in the past and even if they can't dig up things like exact product pricing, they will aggregate signals in market like a executive job posting in EMEA that shows they're about to expand internationally, or a change to their pricing pa ...Read More

If your'e missing the mark, take a step back. Make sure you have a clear understanding of the business challenge you're trying to solve (why do we need this research, what decisions will it help drive). I will share a tangable example of how we approached "how does our tech stack up" At a previous company we were evaluating the decsion to build or acquire to fill a gap in our offering. The first step we took was to be clear on who our target audience was (if we invest in this, who will care and ...Read More

The definition of "Extensive competitive product research" may be different for different people. I suggest asking the CEO and Product / Engineering teams the kind of questions they are looking to answer. Sometimes the high level market research you can get from a 3rd party will not be enough, and you will need to get creative to get the information needed via surveys, primary research or other methods. My best advise here is to define the task in more detail to undertand what people are expecti ...Read More

I think this one just dropped in. Let's do it live! My gut reaction is: If you're being asked to do "extensive competitive research," something is broken. And you should say no, gracefully. It's very difficult, if not impossible to learn how to win in a market by looking at a competitive product from your (biased) POV.  If your CEO/founder/prouct team doesn't understand what problem they're solving for a customer and where they have a unique differentiator, you're not going to get that answer fr ...Read More

This is definitely tricky since getting in-depth product intel requires intimate knowledge about your competitors products. One technique some companies employ is mystery shopping research where you hire a researcher to pose as a buyer, but your organization may have a stance against this type of research. You can always look through review sites like G2 to see how your products are compared against top competitors products. But what I've found to be most effective is actually spending time talk ...Read More

My first recommendation would be to make sure you understand exactly what exactly your stakeholders are wanting to know (and why). Are they looking at making product decisions based on this information? Adjusting the pricing? Refining the messaging? Knowing the strategic goals behind the request will help you know what types of information to search for.  Next, frame your search by putting together a template for a product comparison matrix comparing your product with each of your top competitor ...Read More

There's no silver bullet for this. You want to bake competitive research into everything you do and have your antennae out. The cool thing about product marketing is that done right, you have a unique vantage point. You are the closest members of your team to customer conversastions, product conversations as well as what analysts and influencers think of you. So you have to synthesize those inputs. Take and share notes on an ongoing basis and then summarize findings in battlecards, competitive d ...Read More

Claude Co-work...How good are your prompts? Competitors are pushing out tons of collateral. It's actually pretty easy now to go grab a few key pieces of collateral...always have a fake email address just for this purpose, i use a google apps domain that costs $10/yr or whatever and a few bucks a month for the email seat. You can use all this information to your advantage to see how these companies differentiate their products in a crowded space. And now with benefit of AI, you can automate a ton ...Read More

There are different types of competitive product research. Therefore, it's important to ask execs who this research is for.Doing extensive competitive product research to train sales and customer-success is one thing. They're often satisfied with a one- to two-page "battle card" that will help them beat the competition. They rarely need an exhaustive list of every feature (and, if you did create that exhaustive comparison list, it would likely overwhelm them anyway). If the research is for produ ...Read More

To start I'd say thorough competitive research is the foundation of great product marketing, so it's great that your company is investing in it. It's really important for the PMM that owns a product to be an expert on both direct and indirect competitors. Competitive research shouldn't happen in a vaccuum — it needs to be informed by persona research and the long term vision and product strategy. Especially at the early stages of a new product, the competitive landscape can seem vast and intimid ...Read More

The industry sector you deal with may lead to different suggestions. In general, however, “product research” may suggest you are working on a new product launch or re-staging. In such cases, begin with the framework, consider the research tools, and then move to the operating part of the research. The framework may be the: - Product Strategy, for products bought for what they do (like pharmaceuticals, chemicals, engineering, and others) and/or the - Copy Strategy, for products characterized by h ...Read More

Sales and customers will be your most vital partners for this task. They will have likely have had multiple run-ins with your competitors. As a result, they will give you an excellent high-level understanding of competitive pitches, pricing, what attracted customers to them, and how the market, in general, perceives them. When you want to go deeper on a technical level, SEs, TMEs, and other PMs will be able to assist you with a feature-to-feature comparison, but keep in mind to approach the prob ...Read More

When competitive research misses the mark, it's often because it stays too close to feature comparisons. CEOs and product teams may need to understand why customers pick one product over another — and that answer rarely lives in a feature matrix alone. Bring in the voice of sellers and customers The biggest gap I see in competitive research is missing what the people closest to deals are hearing. Win-loss analysis is really helpful here (bonus if you have budget to get a 3rd party to interview b ...Read More

Here are some tips based on my eperience: 1. Keeping up with competitive product research, especially in tech, is hard: The tech space evolves at a rapid pace and your research can become absolute/stale within few weeks. Provide competitive intelligence back to your CEO/Product teams at an agreed upon cadence.  2. Try to templatize your findings. You will likely find your data on various product pages, press announcements and internet in general. Following a common template where it's easier for ...Read More