You know what it is like to define and shepherd a product through the long process of development and then face the ultimate marketplace judgment about your efforts. There are so many times that you would pay handsomely for credible information that helped you decide on the right strategy, select the right market, position correctly versus your competitors and, of course, reach your revenue and profit goals. Good competitive intelligence addressees all of those questions.

Your job is to champion one or more products for your company. Each product needs to be successful in a marketplace crowded with existing competitors. New threats emerge over time that you have to anticipate and proactively manage. Development teams count on your guidance to build the product with the right features. Your general manager relies on you to help deliver the needed revenues and profits. All along the way, you have to understand the environment, explain your recommendations and justify the company’s investments for your product. This is not a job for the timid.

Competitive Intelligence Helps With the Challenges

• Understand the market need. Every product attempts to fulfill a need in the market. Sometimes features represent this. Other times, the segmentation is determined more by price, distribution or something else. Often, a complex combination of market characteristics makes success possible.
  Competitive Intelligence paints a market landscape showing major forces and trends that affect your company’s strategies.
• Characterize the competition. There are products that do much of what your product hopes to do. There are companies that are established, customers that have made choices and strategies that are being executed that affect your potential success.
  Competitive Intelligence illuminates the formulae used by others (including their weaknesses) allowing you to refine your market understanding.
• Define the product. Feature lists are important. More than that, you need to define what is important and compelling about the product. Then, there is a process to document and present this to internal teams for their comment.
  Competitive Intelligence compares products and explains the critical differences to justify product directions.
• Develop the product. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned. Your task during development is to guide the teams responsible and answer a myriad of questions. Decisions and tradeoffs are constantly required of you.
  Competitive Intelligence supports decisions making during product development by constantly supplying updated market and product information to you.
• Promote the product. Even before the product development is complete, you have to talk with prospective customers, ecosystem partners, distributors and press to promote the product. Your messaging is critical to proper positioning and a positive reception.
  Competitive Intelligence answers the question of why your product makes more sense than the competitors’ products for your prospective customers.

It is hard to be a good product manager. Why not take every advantage of competitive intelligence information? See an expert and get started.