Product Management: How to deal with competitors

Yesterday I shared my thought on kinds of competitors to watch out for.  I would continue that train of thought, and talk a little about how to deal with competitors.

When anyone mentions someone else as a competitor, find out everything about them.  Who is working on it, what their product does, what their product does not do, and what customers are saying about them.  Most importantly the one thing that you want to find out is their message to customers, that is, their customer pitch.

The reason why the pitch is important is because chances are the competitor may not be solving the problem that you are going after.  Even when people approach the same problem, the ways we solve them are almost always not identical.  And our approach often changes.  Remember that most startups have at least a couple of pivots to find their product market fit.

Product Management: Fear the unknown competitors

After reading Ben Parr's piece Why startups shouldn't be afraid of Facebook cloning them, I thought about the topic a little bit.  I agree with Parr's observation.  Facebook jumping in and cloning the app should not be a death sentence to a startup.  If anything, it should be seen as a validation that the idea is interesting and there is that much more potential for the market.

The reason is multiple fold.  The main one is that a big company like Facebook will not focus on single application idea because it's just too small and unproven to move Facebook's needle.  It means two things.  One, Facebook has other bread-earning business that they cannot let go, and two, although Facebook touts moving fast and breaking things, it is not going to be as fast as the laser-focused startup of a single team.

Facebook Poke is not the death sentence for Snapchat.
Snapchat should focus on its customers and building its roadmap.
Source: http://techcrunch.com

Product Management: Copy or not to copy?

There are many advises that you can find about whether to copy your competitor's features or not.  When you launch a product, it's invariably true that sooner or later you'll find competitors entering the market.  Competitors may have better technology, faster architecture, and sleeker design.  You hear they are picking up customers and start to show momentum.  You may even hear that they are looking to pass your customer base and revenue.  What do you do?

Do you look at their product and start copying their features?  Or stay with your roadmap and continue cranking out what you believe are the right features?

It depends.  There are so many hidden assumptions in a question like this, so it's impossible to answer as is.  But the general rule is this.

Your reason for implementing a feature cannot be "because my competitor does."

Not only it's a fallacy to think in bandwagon mentality, but from customer's perspective your product may solve different problem than your competitor's even if they are in the same market.  If customers are using your product for a reason that is different from your competitor's product, then you have to examine whether the feature will make sense for your customers and prospects.  If it's not adding enough value, then it will just bloat your feature set and make it more difficult to evolve your product.

So answer to the question is, if the feature makes sense for your customers, absolutely.  Not just copy but build on the feature to make it better for your customers.  If it does not, don't even copy.