Stop Building Features Nobody Wants: How to Actually Do Competitive Analysis
John Doe
Your competitors just shipped that feature you've been "considering" for six months.
Again.
I've watched too many product teams treat competitive analysis like a box-checking exercise. They build elaborate spreadsheets comparing feature counts, take screenshots of competitor UIs, and file everything away in Notion where it slowly dies. Then they act surprised when a competitor eats their lunch with something obvious.
The truth is, most competitive analysis is performance art for stakeholders. You're not actually learning what to build next — you're just documenting what already exists.
Why Traditional Competitive Analysis Fails
Here's the typical process: Junior PM gets assigned "competitive research." They sign up for every competitor's free trial, click through features, and build a massive comparison matrix. Rows of companies, columns of features, checkmarks everywhere.
This tells you exactly nothing about what matters.
I've seen teams obsess over feature parity while completely missing why customers actually choose one product over another. (Spoiler: it's rarely the feature count.) You end up building me-too features that customers don't care about while your actual differentiators rot.
Actually, that's not quite right. The real problem isn't the research itself — it's that most teams stop there. They never connect the dots between what competitors are doing and what they should build.
The Framework That Actually Works
Forget the feature comparison spreadsheet. Start with jobs-to-be-done.
Your users hire your product to solve specific problems. Your competitors are fighting for the same jobs. The question isn't "what features do they have?" It's "how well do they solve the core job, and where do they fail?"
Here's my approach:
1. Map the Job Landscape First
Before you even look at competitors, define the job your users are trying to get done. Not your product's job — the user's job.
For example, if you're building project management software, the job isn't "manage projects." That's too generic. The real jobs might be:
"Keep executives informed without constant status meetings"
"Coordinate handoffs between design and engineering"
"Prove we're not behind schedule"
Each job has different success criteria. Different pain points. Different moments of frustration.
2. Experience the Job, Don't Demo Features
Sign up for competitor products, but don't go straight to their feature list. Actually try to get the job done.
I spent two weeks using Linear for a real project (not a toy example — an actual project with deadlines and stakeholders). I wasn't evaluating their features. I was experiencing their solution to the coordination job.
The insights were completely different from what I would have gotten from a feature comparison:
Their keyboard shortcuts aren't just "nice to have" — they're essential for the rapid triage job
The lack of Gantt charts isn't a missing feature — it's a philosophical choice about how work should flow
Their GitHub integration isn't just "another integration" — it's core to how they think about engineering workflow
3. Find the Gaps, Not the Features
This is where it gets interesting. You're looking for three types of gaps:
Execution gaps: They have the right idea but poor implementation. Maybe their mobile app is an afterthought, or their onboarding drops users after step 3.
Job gaps: They're solving adjacent jobs but missing the core one. Like how early Slack competitors focused on file sharing when the real job was "reduce internal email."
Philosophy gaps: They're solving the job but with fundamentally different assumptions about how it should work.
The philosophy gaps are gold. That's where you find your positioning.
4. Instrument Your Analysis
Here's where most teams go completely off the rails. They do all this research and... what? Present it in a deck?
Build a system to track competitive moves over time. I use a simple script that monitors competitor changelogs, blog posts, and job postings:
(Yes, this is basic web scraping with extra steps. But it works.)
The patterns matter more than individual moves. If three competitors all start hiring ML engineers, that's a signal about where the market is heading. If everyone's suddenly talking about "workflow automation," you need to understand why.
5. Connect to Roadmap Decisions
This is the part that actually matters: translating analysis into decisions.
I use a simple framework. For each competitive move, ask:
React: Do we need to match this immediately?
Differentiate: Can we solve the same job better or differently?
Ignore: Is this solving a job we don't care about?
Most moves are "ignore." That's fine. Actually, that's good — it means you have focus.
The "differentiate" bucket is where you make money. Linear didn't try to build better Gantt charts than Microsoft Project. They decided Gantt charts were the wrong solution and built something completely different.
Real Example: How We Used This
Last year, we were getting killed by a competitor in enterprise deals. Sales kept asking for feature X, Y, and Z to match them.
Instead of building those features, we did the job analysis. Turns out enterprise buyers weren't actually asking for those features — they were asking for confidence that we could handle their scale and complexity.
The competitor's features were just proof points for that confidence. Building the same features would have made us a worse version of them.
Instead, we focused on different proof points:
Better uptime guarantees
More detailed audit logs
Faster implementation timelines
Same job (enterprise confidence), different solution. We won the next three enterprise deals.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most competitive analysis doesn't change what you build. It just makes you feel informed.
If your last competitive analysis didn't result in either (a) building something new, (b) killing something planned, or (c) changing your positioning, then you wasted everyone's time.
The goal isn't to track competitors. It's to build products that win.
Your spreadsheet of competitor features isn't helping with that. Your understanding of the jobs users need done — and how well everyone else is doing those jobs — that's what matters.
Stop counting their features. Start experiencing their solutions. The difference will show up in your roadmap.