UseCase.org | Illustrating a competitive landscape

What processes or tools are you using to understand the market landscape? I'm using SWOT analysis but looking for other tools.

Transcript

1. Question of the week What processes or tools are you using to understand the market landscape? I'm using SWOT analysis but looking for other tools. Perspectives from Jay Melone THE PRODUCT COMMUNITY Carie Davis Michael Bamberger
2. Read more best practices on Usecase.org Michael is the cofounder of Alpha UX, and has been developing digital products for more than 15 years, serving in roles ranging from developer to product manager. He was previously a Vice President at Greenhaven Partners, a private equity firm, where he managed digital strategy and research business units across the portfolio of companies. MICHAEL BAMBERGER Michael’s Perspective Maintaining a good understanding of the competitive landscape is no easy task. I like to rely on a multifaceted approach to ensure my understanding is as comprehensive as possible. Though these aren't the more rigorous techniques like SWOT, ADL matrices, or game theory techniques, I find them to be directly insightful and actionable. They can also be great sources of input for more formulaic analyses. Below are a few tools and strategies I regularly use: Sales Team - Insight from the sales team is often more valuable than any other source. Typically sales people will know to which companies you are being compared in the mind of your prospective customer. They will also typically have good insight into what customers like or dislike most about competitive offerings. Going Undercover - I regularly schedule demos or intro calls as a prospect for other companies or tools that are even remotely related to our business. There's no easier way to understand how your competitors position themselves or what's working for them than by talking to them directly. One great tip is to ask your competitors sales reps who their biggest competitors are and how they differentiate themselves. Competitive User Testing - Having individuals from your target user or customer base evaluate your competitors' marketing materials and products is an invaluable resource of competitive intelligence. Having these testers not know which company is yours and having them evaluate your materials vs. your competitors often creates great understanding of how you compare. Google Alerts - Setting up alerts for known competitors helps you track what kind of messaging they are using and what type of coverage they're getting from media outlets. Competitors' content strategies can be remarkably good sources of insight for understanding what they're working on and what's likely been successful for them. Online Marketing Tools - SpyFu and SimilarWebare two of my favorites. They keep track of things like paid keywords and social media activity to give a good understanding of how what we do stacks up to other similar companies. Though online marketing is only a component of the competitive landscape, it can often be a great indicator.
3. Read more best practices on Usecase.org Carie Davis is a Partner at Your Ideas Are Terrible and is the former Global Director of Innovation at Coca Cola. CARIE DAVIS Carie’s Perspective One weakness of SWOT is that it's an insular view. If your goal is new product development, the most useful thing you can do is talk to people. Be with them when they use your products and competitors' products. Instead of the using traditional research techniques to understand the market landscape, I find it compelling to first deeply understand the problems that people can't solve for themselves, what they're doing (or using) to try to solve them and how they're failing. This will be more useful information when you get to prioritizing and deciding next steps because you have evidence directly from customers. Start small. Spend a week and talk to 20 people you believe are your customers and what could be a useful value proposition for them based on their challenges. Record your findings of customers and value propositions on the business model canvas.
4. Read more best practices on Usecase.org Jay’s Perspective We follow a lean approach to learning about the digital apps we create. Prior to designing any wireframes or storyboards, we do a bunch of customer interviews. This info serves as our raw customer & market data. From it, we create empathy maps and user personas. We often follow those with both a business model canvas and value proposition canvas. At this stage, we know a substantial amount about who the customer is, what pains and gains we're solving for and how to design a product they'll find the most value in, aka we've taken our first (and best) steps toward product-market fit. We wrap up this initial 2-3 week sprint with a product roadmap, where we summarize all we've learned and begin to map out releases that contain prioritized feature sets, along with how we'll measure success (KPIs) that allow us to iterate and optimize from there. You can see this process in action and with greater detail here: http://www.newhaircut.com/#!/process/how-it-works. You can also read more about our thoughts on lean development within our blog, here: http://blog.newhaircut.com/customer- learning-comes-building-lean-startups-2/ and here: http://blog.newhaircut.com/lean-product-development-equal-build- sorry/ Jay runs a digital design agency called New Haircut. His applied background is in product design and UX, along with a host of previous tech roles. Direct message Jay on LinkedIn with further questions JAY MELONE
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