Comparing Products - Who Are Your Customers (Part 2)

The first step to comparing products is understanding your customers.  This may seem counter-intuitive, but your product’s capabilities are meaningless unless you are comparing them from your customer’s point of view.  This article is part 2 in a series on comparing products.  Check out part 1, then continue with this article on the first steps of comparing products.

Overall Product Comparison Process

This is may be a long series.  Each article will start with a recap of the overall process.

Getting useful information from comparing products requires you to:

1. Introduction & Overview (so that the step-numbers align with the article numbers)
2. Identify your customers. (This article)
3. Articulate the problems they care about solving.
4. Determine how important solving each problem is, relative to the other problems, for your customers.
5. Characterize how important it is for you to solve the problems of each group of customers.
6. Discover which (competitive) products your customers consider to be your competition.
7. Assess how effectively each competitive product solves each important problem, for each important group of customers.

With this information, you can create a point of view about how your product compares to the others.

From that point of view, you can determine where to invest in your product.  That’s the whole point of doing the comparison – not to be self-congratulatory, but to guide forward thinking.  I’ve stopped being excited when I find existing “product comparisons” and game plans when starting to work with a product team.  To date, they have always been “positioning papers” designed to emphasize the product’s strength – usually prepared for internal sales teams, but unfortunately, sometimes prepared for executives (“Look!  We’ve done a great job!”) Those documents are a useful source of information to get you started down the product comparison path, but if you let them guide you, they will take you down the primrose path.

Identify Your Customers

You want to have a model that represents how you are approaching your market. As a product manager focused on solving customer problems, you should have a customer-centric market model.