The Importance of Competitive Monitoring

It's important to build efficiency in how you track #competition as a Product Manager.

Some PMs conduct quarterly or bi-yearly competitor reviews.

I now prefer to keep a constant pulse of the market. How?

1. Subscribe to all social accounts of competitors

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2. Opt in for their newsletters

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3. Sign up for their webinars

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4. Setup Google Alerts for top 2-3 players

As I'm browsing through my mail & feeds, I'm kept apprised of movements in the industry. This approach allows me to forward content to appropriate team members, update Asana boards & kick start discussions on Slack.

But what's very import to understand is that tracking competition is NOT about imitation, rather it's about intimation.

It's supposed to trigger questions to understand the evolving landscape..

What kind of new problems are being solved? If a competitor launched a product or feature, what was the motivation? Why now? Why did they partner with X?

The idea is to leverage off their research and insights. NOT go "OMG - this feature is so cool! Let's push this in the next release & win the internet."