Here’s a quote from my forthcoming book, The Art of Ben:
When evaluating your opponent, focus on his strengths for they may reveal your weaknesses. Focusing on his weaknesses will not necessarily reveal your own strengths. Rather, it reveals only your own arrogance.
When we look at a competitor’s product, we tend to look for the bad parts: what doesn’t work, the bugs, the poor user interface, experience, flow, implementation, performance etc.
We tend to want to look at our own product in a better light.
That is a perfectly human reaction. When I come up with what I think is a great idea, I want to put it on a pedestal and show the world how smart I am. I don’t want someone or something to come along and smash that “great” idea to smithereens with counter arguments and counter examples.
However, an idea is not great if it cannot withstand the weight of counter arguments and in the same way, a product is not great, if it cannot stand on its merits with respect to the competition.
Dealing with the competitor’s products is not just the product manager’s job. The company’s leadership has to set the tone: that competing products are not dismissed out of hand as poor implementations and therefore don’t matter, that the entire organization take the threat of competing products seriously, whether in fixing the weak areas on one’s own product line, or improving the quality or just by a matter of better and faster execution.
This is difficult to do in a start-up organization. Partly because passion and enthusiasm drive such organizations and you don’t want to extinguish that with talk of the competition being better. Partly, because such organizations want to move fast and hence have little time and energy to look back at the competition.
In any case, it is better to be paranoid than sorry. And that is yet another saying from the Art of Ben.