In the last couple of posts, I talked about how to go about market analysis and finding competitors. Now, let's do a deeper dive into our competitors' products. This will help us to understand what features are out there. It will tell us how competitive we are before launching our product. Generally speaking, we can create a chart known as a "Feature Table" to these comparisons.
The X-axis can represent our competitors while the Y-axis can feature/factors. These features are the ones that we think are important. I have also seen product managers using the technique to prioritize a given feature.
Let's take a look at an example. Below is a feature table for few product management blogs that I follow:
Just by looking at it, I realized that I need to think about adding the popular posts section and maybe think about pagination for ease of navigation for my readers. It tells me that as of now, I am not offering any unique features as compared to other product management blogs out there. I am going to look at some successful blogs ( not necessarily related to product management) and see what they offer.
I realized there are so many advantages of doing such a comparison. It can tell us how we differentiate our products with respect to other products in the market. We can use attributes like price, reliability, and other metrics that are important to us to see if we should drop features, add features, start charging for our features or maybe do nothing. At the least, It helps to get the dialogue started.
How do you do feature comparisons. Do you find it useful. Don't forget to share your thoughts