Tracking The Market

Your competition provides a window into your users’ needs.

Why Track the market

In a free market, businesses must constantly adapt to meet the evolving needs of their users. For Product Managers, your “market” may be defined as your direct competitors and adjacent spaces. Here’s why it is critical to track the market:

Learn about your potential users

Your competitors’ features provide a window into the needs of your potential customers. To win over those customers, you must first achieve feature parity. Then, you can compete by offering a better overall package (price and support) or by building a better product (more features). Your sales team can be a valuable resource, providing insights into why potential customers are not ready to move.

Stay updated & monitor trends

Your potential user needs will keep pushing competitors to evolve. This will allow you to connect the dots and try to figure out which way the market is moving.

As technology and tools improve, user needs will keep evolving the market. The history of the mobile phone is a great example of this (Phone -> Apps -> Camera -> AI access tool -> ??)

Learn, especially if you are new

If you are new to the market, reading up on all the content from your competitors is a crash course in understanding the dynamics, challenges, and opportunities within your chosen market.