What are the best product strategy tools to evaluate your competition?

Identify Strengths and Weaknesses: Assess your product's internal strengths and weaknesses, providing insights into areas where you excel or need improvement compared to competitors. Spot Opportunities and Threats: Evaluate external factors, identifying potential market opportunities and threats that could impact your product's success. Strategic Decision-Making: Use these insights to inform product goals, prioritize features, and ensure your team is aligned with the overall product vision and competitive strategy.

Focus on understanding your target audience's needs, pain points, and desires. This ensures your product aligns with customer expectations.

Extend your SWOT analysis to be customer-centric. Understand how your product aligns with the evolving needs and expectations of your target audience.

The Jobs to be Done framework can be a useful tool to identify items and where they fit on the SWOT analysis relative to competitors. By identifying which JTBD your product excels at and which JTBD may not be met, you can identify your differentiators and also some potential roadmap capabilities.

Porter's Five Forces framework analyzes the competitive forces within an industry to assess its attractiveness and profitability ?? 1?? Threat of New Entrants 2?? Bargaining Power of Buyers 3?? Bargaining Power of Supplier 4?? Threat of Substitute Products or Services 5?? Intensity of Competitive Rivalry A strong or weak force in any area influences the industry structure and dynamics, guiding strategic decisions to enhance competitive advantage or manage challenges effectively. The goal is to position the business favorably in the industry landscape to achieve sustainable profitability.??

Go beyond buyer bargaining power analysis. Focus on building strong customer relationships to create loyalty and reduce the emphasis on price competition.

Consider how technological advancements or digital innovations could reshape your industry. Understanding the digital landscape can help you proactively adapt and innovate.

Identify not only your unique value proposition but also your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. This broader perspective can inform your strategy and highlight areas for improvement.

Continuously refine your value proposition as you gather feedback and data from customers. Adapt to changing market dynamics and customer needs.

Direct Feature Comparison: List and compare key features of your product alongside those of competitors, providing a clear view of how your product compares in terms of functionality and offerings. Identify Strengths and Gaps: By rating features on importance and performance, you can identify areas where your product excels or falls short, as well as spot market gaps your product could fill. Inform Roadmap Prioritization: Use insights from the matrix to prioritize development efforts on features that can enhance your competitive advantage or address critical gaps.

Absolutely 2x2 grids are critical to understanding your competitive positioning - exposing potential pitfalls and uncovering opportunities for differentiation. They are also great visuals for training colleagues and partners on key aspects of the market. Just note that it's the full collection of these maps that brings impact, as they shouldn't be used on a standalone basis.

It's useful to keep in mind not only direct competitors but also indirect and substitute competitors. This will give you a better representation of the overall competitive landscape.