How to do competitive analysis for your product

To make sure your product stays ahead of the curb, you must monitor your competitors and know why your customers are picking them over you. Competitive analysis can provide valuable insights and pave the way for both short and long-term product objectives. While competitive analysis can take time to do, here are some ways where you can quickly gain insights to inform your day-to-day decision-making.

Ask their customers

What better way to understand why your competitors are winning, than to ask the people that picked them? Conduct user interviews with people who are in your target audience, but are using your competitor's product and not yours. Ask them what problems they faced when they were searching for a problem, the steps they took to choose the product, and why that was their product of choice. These interviews also offer a great opportunity to ask what your competitors are not doing well and what it would take for them to switch over to a better solution. To find these users, read here for the various user testing and user interview platforms that you can leverage.

Read market reports and papers

Search the internet for "top tools for [X]" and you will discover lots of blogs and articles that write reviews on solutions in your space. Some may even contain screenshots and demo videos of your competitor solutions. What's best about this approach is often, the author would have done the work for you to bring out pros and cons of each solution, and perhaps even case studies of who their customers are, and what they're working on next. If your competitor is a publicly traded company, you can also go to the Investor Relations section of their website and discover details about their current and upcoming priorities. 

Sign-up as a user

Get first-hand experience on what your competitors are doing. This is the best way to discover your competitor's product, such as how their onboarding and activation process works, and how they approach each key function that may or may not overlap with yours. You may also choose to create an e-mail or phone number that is generic so that they don't know that you're snooping on their product! Remember to take screenshots and put it on a Figjam or Miro board.

Develop a monitoring routine

Now that you have a baseline level of insight on your competitors, it's a good idea to create a monitoring board of your top 3-5 competitors, and how their product evolves over time. Make this a habit, so that you don't have to carve off too much of your day to make sure you're staying on top of your competitors on an ongoing basis!

These were just some quick ways that you can gain quick and insightful insights on your competitors to help with your everyday decision-making. We hope that you can take some of this information away to improve your product workflow.