Help users understand and respond to competition. Use when someone is positioning against competitors, evaluating market threats, running competitive war games, or deciding how much to focus on competitors versus customers.
Help the user understand competitive dynamics using frameworks from 49 product leaders who have navigated competition at companies from startups to Netflix and Google.
When the user asks for help with competitive analysis:
April Dunford: "Most folks will discount the status quo, but they shouldn't because in B2B we lose about 40% of our deals to 'no decision,' which actually means we lost to the spreadsheet, we lost to pen and paper." Position specifically against current workarounds, not just competitors.
April Dunford: "The first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand, what do we have to position against? What do I have to beat in order to win a deal?" Look beyond direct competitors to anything customers would do if your product didn't exist.
Hamilton Helmer: "Understanding whether or not there is a type of power in place is hard... the hard part is industry economics, what really are the economic relationships." Surface-level competitive analysis misses the structural forces that determine winners.
Shaun Clowes: "In everything always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective. The very small number of PMs do that." Great PMs differentiate by grounding work in market realities, not internal politics.
Bret Taylor: "Why use this instead of Yahoo Yellow Pages? But more than anything else, why use this instead of the Yellow Pages?" Compete against the traditional, non-digital way users solve the problem.
Jake Knapp: "What's the competition for solving that problem? How do they solve it today? And what are the alternatives? What are the workarounds?" Look beyond direct startup competitors to manual processes and existing habits.
Elena Verna: "Knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important... But blatantly copying all of these best tactics or flows because they're doing better than us - that's where things really go wrong." Use competitors for inspiration, not replication.
Tanguy Crusson: "Your competitor, if you think of what they do as an iceberg, the top side is what they've shipped in terms of features, but it's based on all this stuff they've built in terms of research." You only see their past output, not their underlying strategy.
For all 63 insights from 49 guests, see references/guest-insights.md