Mind the Gaps (In your product)

When you’re deciding what to include and exclude from your product, there are a variety of factors you need to consider.

Hopefully, the first thing that comes to mind is customer needs. If not, we need to have a chat…

But there are other factors to consider, and one that presents a bit of a slippery slope is your market and your competition.

It’s a slippery slope because you certainly should consider other solutions customers use to solve their problems. But you shouldn’t become infatuated with adding every single feature your competitors have “because everyone else has it.”

(Queue your mother saying “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it?”)

You need some way of understanding the gaps that exist between your product and your competitors. You also need to determine if you care whether those gaps exist.

That’s where a competitive gap analysis can come in handy.

Here are some resources on what competitive gap analysis are, and how you can use them with your product.

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A Guide to Gap Analysis

It’s easy to lose sight of your goal in business. Core values get buried by endless new projects and mounting processes. As a result, it becomes tricky to know whether your performance meets your long-term goals. When this happens, gap analysis can help.

Maybe you want to see if your existing systems still meet your goals. Maybe you’re planning your next steps, or deciding where to focus resources. Or maybe you’re working out which features should make it into your product.

With gap analysis, you make sure that what you’re doing currently aligns with the future you’re chasing. To help you out, Niamh Isobel Reed provides a handy guide to gap analysis.

How to Find the Product Gaps that are Killing Your Strategy

The product manager’s role often requires saying no to ideas for new products and requests to add features to existing ones. PMs have limited time, budget, and people to help them bring new products to the market. They need to be highly selective and choose only a few strategic initiatives at a time that they believe will move their product toward a company goal. And this can lead a PM to wonder: Are we saying no too much? Are we ignoring product gaps? Are those gaps undermining our product’s strategy?

No product will ever be perfect. There will always be some percentage of customers who find it lacking. The only way to discover what a product is missing, or why it might not resonate with users, is to release the product to the market. But even after you’ve launched your product, you still need a process for identifying potential product gaps. The folks at ProductPlan discuss a few ideas for finding those product gaps.

How to use a competitive gap analysis to blast past your competitors

When you release a product, you probably don’t want to let folks down with unmet expectations. Sometimes those expectations can be hard to identify because your customers are formulating them based on competing products. This creates gaps you need to pay attention to.

Alex Walton explains how you can use a competitive gap analysis to close the gap between your own products and competitor products. Do this, and you'll establish a competitive advantage.

What's a Competitive Analysis & How Do You Conduct One?

When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand? And most importantly, do you know how to do one efficiently??

If you're not sure, or if the last "analysis" you ran was a quick perusal of a competitor's website and social media presence, you're likely missing out on important intelligence that could help your brand grow.

Christine White explains how to conduct a competitive analysis that will give your business a competitive advantage in the market.?

Product Managers Gap Analysis Template

As a product manager, you're constantly striving to bridge the gap between where your product is and where you want it to be. But without a clear roadmap, it's easy to get lost in the shuffle. That's where ClickUp's Product Managers Gap Analysis Template comes in to save the day!

With this template, you can:

• Identify the gaps between your current product and the desired state
• Prioritize improvements and innovations based on customer needs and business goals
• Create a strategic plan to close the gaps and propel your product forward

Don't let your product fall behind. Use ClickUp's Gap Analysis Template to stay on track and deliver the best possible product to your customers.

Thanks for Reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, let me know in the comments.

Talk to you in a couple of weeks,

Kent J. McDonald Founder | KBP.Media