What framework can Product Marketing and Product use to share competitive insights to prioritize the product roadmap and achieve high adoption and usage rates?

There are a few approaches I have found helpful here.

1. A good ol' SWOT analysis may be what you need. This is a pretty common framework where you list strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your own product, and a competitor's. Placing the two side by side can illuminate areas where your team should focus.

2. Sometimes a feature comparison table is helpful if you need a more granular view of how you stack up against a competitor at the feature level. Here you can use a spreadsheet or table. List all the features you offer or are considering, and features your competitors offer in the left side column. Then add your company or product at the top of the next column, and add your competitors across the top. Then go through each feature and mark which product or company offers it. When you're done you'll have a very granular map of where your product is strong, and where you may be missing features that competitors have.

3. Gather and analyze data from internal teams. Leverage your support, community, and social teams to see if they can provide data on how often a particular feature is requested. If you have a sales team, find out if they can query their CRM tool for keywords related to the feature(s) you want to consider. Bonus points if your sales team can help you associate the potential revenue lost due to a lack of a particular feature.

I'm going to take this question in a slightly different direction and make a pitch for collaborating with Product (and many other teams) on a comprehensive "Understand Synthesis" as the basis for annual planning/roadmapping. This can be a transformative way for teams to generate better shared understanding and align on market research priorities for the next planning cycle. How it works:

1\ As a kick-off to annual planning, align with Product and other key stakeholders on the biggest questions you need to answer in order to be successful in the coming year-plus.

2\ Scour existing research to figure out what data and insights you can already bring to bear on those questions. In many cases, you might find that you can generate a decent answer to one of your fundamental questions without doing any new research!

3\ Where there are major disputes about existing data and/or gaps in understanding, create a research roadmap to generate new insights that should answer the big questions.

Aligning with Product on the research roadmap and more important generating a shared POV on key questions - perhaps without having to invest any more time in answer them - can turbo-charge the roadmapping and annual planning process.

Creating a synergy between teams to prioritize your product roadmap for optimal adoption and increased usage rates involves a series of strategic analyses and steps. Here are some key analyses that can help:

1. Competitor SWOT analysis: Dive deep into understanding your product's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in comparison to your competitors. This analysis empowers you to navigate the competitive landscape, capitalize on your strengths, and address areas for improvement.

2. Competitor Matrix: A powerful matrix where you align and compare your marketing strategies, product features, sales processes, and target markets with your top competitors. Check out this list of questions for each category. These will guide you in collecting vital data, transforming it into invaluable insights for prioritizing your product roadmap.

3. Customer feedback loop: Your customers are the heartbeat of your success. Establish a dynamic system to collect and analyze their feedback, including insights from those who moved to competitors. Equally crucial is tapping into your internal champions – the sales and customer success teams – to gather intel on your competitors' products through various analyses, such as win/loss analysis, feature matrix comparison, UX analysis, integration with other products, product lifecycle analysis, etc.

4. The Kano model: Serves as a valuable perspective for blending customer insights with market dynamics, incorporating findings from competitive analysis. As the advocate for customers within your organization, your role is instrumental in classifying customer preferences across three crucial categories: fundamental expectations, performance attributes, and delighters.

P.S. Understanding the significance of consistently having feedback loops in place and delving deep into the specific questions and insights sought by product managers are crucial aspects. These measures play a key role in assisting product managers to chart a more precise course for prioritizing the product roadmap.

There are three ways I’ve successfully achieved that in past roles:

1. conduct win/loss analysis regularly. Don’t neglect the quantitative part and look at competition, win rates against each, losses due to functionality and what status quo/ tech stack / competition looked like there.

2. Get in the habit of post launch retrospectives. Start them by looking at KPIs (good sources are product analytics, CS ticket volume, marketing/sales analytics) and ask questions - what should be done differently next time, what worked well, what should be added?

3. Competitive program cannot be successful unless other teams are a part of it. Create a tiger team with product, sales engineering, perhaps a few more prospect or customer facing pros and discuss regularly what each of you has been seeing. Decide if you need more research, enablement, competitive positioning or product changes.

You’re more likely to succeed if you’re collaborative and is basing on insight rather than gut feeling.