Real Competitive Intel for PMMs. The Art of Digging Deeper

Written by Renat Balandin

Imagine this, you're in a meeting, a call, or perhaps just chatting over coffee, and an offhand comment reveals a crucial insight about your competitor's product that changes your entire roadmap. When that happens, it's time to capture that insight and turn it into a strategy. That moment of magic inspired this post. The idea behind competitive intelligence (CI) is that it's not just about scanning online. It's about digging deeper into sources that are often overlooked. Imagine for a moment that you're a call with a customer success manager right in the middle of a tense situation with customers. That moment, captured, is an insight. So, it's time to move beyond the obvious, from online research into conversations, human connections, and feedback loops. Let’s dig deeper.

Why is CI More Than Just Online Research?

• The human element. Product knowledge in many organizations sits inside our colleagues' heads. It might be an offhand comment from a colleague, a story from another team, or a meeting that turns into a case of competitive intelligence. The information that comes from human interactions is almost always deeper and more nuanced than online research.
• The interplay of ideas. Many companies have multiple groups vying for influence on a particular product or feature. CI can explain why a certain feature is winning or why it's doing so poorly, by understanding how a product is performing in the market.
• Build your competitive analysis on real sources. Competitive intelligence should never be based solely on internet searches. Seeking out sources like sales calls, industry conferences, customer interviews, and analyst reports will help you distinguish what is real from what is noise.

Contributions to Competitive Intel

Flows of CI

How to Learn From Your Competitors

• Go beyond scraping tools. Tools can be helpful, but they're not infallible. A great tool for gathering insights into customer pain points are the calls that customers make to your support team, and in that respect, competitive intelligence should start with real sources, customer feedback and sales calls.
• Cross-functional build-up. As a PMM, you act as a bridge between teams. You should build CI as a shared endeavor with these teams, the sales team, product managers, and customer success managers can all play a vital role in gathering competitive intelligence.
• Tell better stories. Competitive intelligence is a story, it's often statistics and facts, but it's about telling a better story. Stories are why people understand competitive positioning. Build narratives that connect metrics quickly and effectively. Provide context, sources, real examples, and what this means for the product.
• Make it actionable. It should not be just a slide deck. Enable your team to take action, make the information available to internal teams, and identify the specific next steps to take.

Key Takeaways

• Don't be afraid to change course based on real insight, not just online research.
• Prioritize collecting information from real people and sources, not just from the internet.
• Create clear messaging that positions your product against the competition.