What is a Feature Table?
When we have clarity on our competitors, we need to compare ourselves to them to understand exactly where we stand. For this, we use a feature table. In the feature table, we fill in the names of the competitors in columns and place the features we consider important in rows. This creates a comparison chart that allows us to evaluate our product against our competitors’ products on various dimensions.
This table answers many questions, such as how competitive we are in our market. It shows us where other competitors’ products stand, helps us understand what makes them competitive, and provides insights into their products based on customer feedback. We can identify their weaknesses and pain points, which helps us understand what product ideas will truly solve customers’ problems. Additionally, it reveals how other products are performing and what issues they address. Knowing the drawbacks of competitors’ products is useful because we can focus on important features that have high customer demand but are missing in competitors’ products. This can help our product grow in the market, as the main goal of any product development is to design something that effectively solves users’ problems.
Another reason to use a feature table is that it gives us clarity on where our competitors’ products fall short and where they excel. Without this type of competitor research, launching our product into the market could lead to failure. There is a risk that we might introduce a product that is worse than what is already available. Feature Table looks like the below picture, in there we are actually comparing Netflix with its competitors.
We should mostly prefer to build a feature table based on the direct competitors because those are the ones that are gonna be most similar to us, and after comes the indirect, potential, substitute competitors. In general, direct competitors are the ones that you really wanna stay up to date with. Watch their products, see how they change, see what they add, what they remove and try to get a general idea of how they’re gonna react to you when you do something.
Monitoring Competitors:
Up to this point, we have been gathering the information needed to make judgments on our competitors and their products. It’s important to maintain tabs on them, such as what they are introducing, what is new, when they launched, what their customers think about their product, their pain points, the number of funders for that product, the quality of their product team, their aesthetics, and much more. Competition is an ever-changing landscape, so by keeping tabs on our competitors, we can know as soon as they make a change and adjust our product accordingly.
The five dimensions we judge our competitors on:
- The product team: How good or bad are they?
- Design: Is it aesthetically pleasing?
- Brand: How important is their brand? Is it a positive asset for them? Is it so strong that it prevents you from doing things?
- User size: Is it large or just substantial?
- Speed: How quickly are they moving?
These five criteria should always be in our minds when thinking about our competitors. They will constantly make changes and take initiatives that could improve some of these five aspects. Sometimes they’ll make mistakes and lose ground on some of these aspects, and we need to be aware of when this happens.
In this blog, we’re going to cover three different events you should constantly be looking for and three ways to keep tabs on these events. There are countless tiny changes that can happen with your competitors, and it’s worthwhile to know about them — whether they move a button or make a big change to their web app. But there are three things as a product manager that stand out because they have the potential to impact all five criteria we previously mentioned.
The first is funding. This is not something often discussed, but many companies, especially in the startup space, receive venture capital. The amount of money in their bank account can significantly impact our five variables. More money means they can hire more people, spend more on ads, hire more contractors, and pay for more press, thereby increasing their speed. More money also means they can recruit a better product team. While funding doesn’t necessarily change their design, it could allow them to bring on people who can improve design and usability. It can also affect their user size, as startups often use funding for advertising and growing their user base.
How do you know when they get funding? This is where Crunchbase comes in. Crunchbase keeps track of funding for various companies. Just search for the organization you’re monitoring, and you can see their funding timeline. You can follow companies to get email notifications whenever they receive new funding.
The second event to watch for is acquisitions. Acquisitions occur when a company buys another company, integrating it into their own. Companies often do this to acquire a good product team, gain more users, or improve their design capabilities. Acquisitions can also affect brand and speed, though larger organizations might face challenges in maintaining speed. You can track acquisitions on Crunchbase as well.
The third event is feature or new product launches. These are major moves by your competitors, and you must be aware of them, especially if they introduce a product or feature that competes directly with yours. Mention.com is a great tool for this. It tracks your competitors’ social media accounts, monitors customer chatter, and keeps an eye on major updates on their blogs. You can set preferences to get email notifications when significant changes occur.
Lastly, Google Alerts can be a helpful tool. Though not as powerful as Mention, it provides a broader scope. By typing in the company name, Google Alerts will notify you of new search results for your competitor, helping you stay updated on their SEO changes and various conversations.
All this information is incredibly useful for understanding your competitors and making informed decisions about your own product strategy.
