On Competition (drafting)

Sean Horgan

I like to track competition in 3 ways

Market landscape

Company fundamentals

Product teardowns

Market landscape

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Landscapes & Value Chains (drafting)⁠

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Company fundamentals

I like to maintain a list of competitors and place them into tiers that roughly align with the threat they pose to our business, which drives how often I’ll look for news or updates on their products. I don’t want to overdo with competitor research but it’s important to know your customer’s options.

Here’s a template I’ve started with to help track it all:

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Competitor Matrix⁠

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Given the number of zombie organizations and products out there, I’ve found it very useful to track financial & org information to understand the truth health of that competitor. For example, I like to see the employee growth over the last 12 months which you can grab from LinkedIn insights.

Product teardowns

I like to keep a folder of slide decks that walk through my tier 1, maybe tier 2 competitors. Each deck should cover the following

TLDR - 1 slide

SWOT

How should we compete against them?

Product concepts

What product concepts are surfaced in the product UI?

How are product concepts organized, e.g. information architecture?

Who is the UI optimized for?

Screenshots of key user journeys, e.g. onboarding, value prop journeys, billing,

Market landscape

Company fundamentals

Product teardowns

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