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Doing an analysis on your competitive products is essential to making sure your planned products have the best chance of success in the marketplace. You must identify your strategic advantage and leave the competition in the rear-view mirror.
Using competitive analysis in your product planning
In the recent Gocious webinar, "Using competitive analysis in your product planning" available to watch on-demand, we discussed the importance of performing competitive analysis as part of your product planning journey.
Our Product Management expert Jeff Strunk talked about how competitive analysis should be done after first understanding your customers needs. There is a danger that if you start with competitive analysis then you may find yourself facing the same problems your competition has; not meeting the needs of your customers.
Jeff then proceeded to talk about some of the commonly known competitive analysis methods and their uses. Interestingly, he pointed out that techniques like SWOT and Porters 5 Forces are very useful and most definitely have their place. These techniques are more designed to assess products at a higher level, such as in looking at overall business strategy versus a competitor. Product planners need a more detailed data driven side by side competitive analysis as part of the product planning cycle.
The discussion then moved on to the importance of having good sources for competitive data. Sometimes finding data can be problematic but now there are various 3rd party sources that are available. The key then is having a place to store your competitive data for future use.
Jeff presented an example of the more detailed way of doing competitive analysis and discussed why organizations should track data with this model. The key is to also to keep it up to date through out the entire product development lifecycle.
Competitive analysis can be time consuming and tedious, especially when done on the traditional medium of Excel. It is difficult to share and to compare while the analysis is typically done disconnected from your product planning work. One additional key challenge is that everyone has a tendency to do it their own way, making comparisons even more difficult.
Simon Leyland, Gocious Director of Customer Success, then presented Gocious' current competitive analysis capabilities. He also showed the Gocious vision for the future of competitive analysis as part of a seamless end to end product ideation journey.
The webinar finished with Jeff and Simon taking a Q&A session. Discussing the benefits that the Gocious platform would bring and how it would have helped each of them in their previous roles in product management. They also fielded several questions from the audience.
You can download the webinar video and slides to hear the full discussion and learn more about how Gocious helps product managers, planners, designers, and engineers meet today's discrete manufacturing challenges.
