Competitive research: Get the product insights that matter most

There's a secret to getting high impact insights that will propel your business to new heights. You'll get actionable insights on how to improve your competitive gaps/advantages.

First, let's get serious: The problem with research is that customers usually don't know what they need or want. It's one of the reasons product & design teams are sometimes reluctant to do research.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford

But this quote doesn't accept that there are better ways to learn from customers.

After running hundreds of user research sessions for every type of client you could imagine —Fortune 500, charities, and seed startups— the problem is rarely the customer, it's how questions are asked. Customers only know what they know. So if you're in the business of selling horses and ask one of your horse-buying customers what would make them happier, of course they would say a faster/stronger horse.

Competitive product research

We've had countless successes working with Spotify, Microsoft, New Relic, National Football League, and others by implementing competitive product research techniques. We found new feature opportunities, discovered new possible ventures, and prioritized roadmaps around what brings customers the most value (and what isn't actually important at all).

The goal is to upskill your customers' ability to communicate about UX and product, while also breaking through the availability bias of only knowing one way of doing things.

How this method aims to change how you do research:

• Remove your customer's tunnel vision: Many of your customers aren't aware that there are other ways of solving their jobs to be done. All they know is your product and this limits what they believe as possible. They'll tell you want you expect to hear because it's all they know.
• Empower customers to be more directive with feedback: They can't be helpful until they can explain how they want it to work. Show someone your product and they'll tell you new filters they want. Show them a couple of products in comparison and they can start detailing out how it should work.
• Look at your product from a systems perspective: To better help customers you need to better understand how, why, and for what they use your product. You'll often learn that they use your product, and a competitor's, complimentary. Your product sits within the system of their day-to-day and knowing this is when true 'aha!' moments appear.
• Challenge assumptions (& myths) about your product: Many products are built on assumptions and facts that may no longer be true. Ask a customer to complete a task on your product and three others, you'll find out pretty quickly if you actually have the advantage you imagined.
• Solve for churn, proactively: Customers rarely churn because of one problem, they leave because of a long list of gaps or experiences. Competitive research is the perfect framing to learn about how your product works well, falls short, and is frustrating them. You'll see how impactful competing products are and have them explain how your product should be adapted.

Here's how to get started:

1. Collect assumptions from across your teams about what your product's biggest strengths and weaknesses are, plus who your main competitors are
2. Recruit customers who are representative to your different core segments
3. Before you interview them, find out which of them only ever use your product versus those you use multiple, similar products within their workflow
4. Create user flows —of your product & of competitors— based on how you believe customers most use the product
5. Lead moderated interviews where you explore how, when, why products are used with a focus on what they are trying to solve and how they use the product(s) to do that
6. Guide them through exercises where they're asked to compare and score features and tools shared across the different products
7. At the end, ask them to build their ideal product from everything they've used and could imagine from their ideal product

Competitive research assignments like these can also include a benchmarking activity. Those that use multiple products should be asked to rate and rank different aspects and JTBD. Scoring should also be used in the testing to define how effective each product is at particulate tasks/interactions.

If you're interested in learning more about how to use competitive research, please contact us PH1 Research by reaching out to Arpy Dragffy. Our team can help train your team on new methods or we can handle the end-to-end project.