How to Study Competitors and Identify Gaps in Their Offerings: A Product Manager’s Guide

As a Product Manager, one lesson has stood out: no product exists in a vacuum. Competitor analysis isn’t just a “nice-to-have” — it’s an essential component of building successful, market-leading products. Understanding what your competitors are offering and, more importantly, identifying gaps in their solutions, allows you to seize opportunities to differentiate your product and meet customer needs in ways they haven’t yet considered.

Here’s a structured approach to studying competitors and uncovering gaps in their offerings:

1. Start with Customer Needs: The Why Before the What

Before diving into feature comparisons or pricing wars, ask yourself a fundamental question: What are my customers' unmet needs? Identifying gaps in competitors' products begins by understanding what pain points or desires their products fail to address. To do this:

• Engage in Customer Interviews: Speak to your users or potential users. Understand their frustrations, what they like, and what they wish was different.

• Monitor User Reviews: Competitor reviews on platforms like G2, Capterra, or app stores often reveal consistent patterns of customer dissatisfaction. What are users complaining about? These complaints are clues to unmet needs.

• Use Net Promoter Scores (NPS): This helps to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction. A low NPS score could indicate issues that competitors haven’t fully solved yet.

  
  

Focusing on customer pain points ensures your competitive analysis remains user-centered, allowing you to craft solutions that truly matter.

2. Conduct a Comprehensive Competitive Landscape Audit

This is where the groundwork of competitor research happens. Your goal is to gather as much relevant information about competitors’ products, go-to-market strategies, and how they position themselves. Here's a structured approach to do so:

A. Identify Direct and Indirect Competitors

• Direct competitors are those who solve the same problems your product does.

• Indirect competitors are alternatives customers may use (not necessarily in the same category). These could be substitutes or emerging disruptors.

  
  

B. Key Areas to Analyze:

• Product Features: Create a feature comparison grid. Understand the core and additional functionalities of each competitor’s offering. How do they differ? Are they over-engineering or under-delivering?

• Pricing Strategy: How do they price their products? Do they have a freemium model or tiered pricing? Sometimes, gaps can exist in how value is perceived versus the price.

• User Experience (UX): Examine their customer journey, onboarding process, and overall usability. Clunky, complicated UX can create frustration and open the door for competitors with a more intuitive product.

• Market Positioning & Messaging: How are they selling their product? What value propositions are they highlighting? Sometimes, the gap is in perception or positioning, not necessarily in product quality.

3. SWOT Analysis: Evaluate Competitor Strengths and Weaknesses

Perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on your top competitors. This will give you a structured view of where they excel, where they fall short, and where gaps may exist.

• Strengths: What are they doing well? This could be their tech stack, partnerships, or customer loyalty.

• Weaknesses: Where are they struggling? Is their product difficult to scale? Do they have poor customer support?

• Opportunities: What trends or market shifts are they missing? Can you leverage new technologies like AI/ML to create innovative features they don’t have?

• Threats: Consider how external factors (economic shifts, regulatory changes) could pose challenges to their product.

4. Identify and Prioritize Gaps: Where Can You Outperform?

Once you've gathered data on competitors, it’s time to identify the gaps. But remember, not all gaps are worth pursuing. Here’s how to categorize and prioritize:

A. Feature Gaps: What are competitors missing?

• Are there missing features that customers want but aren’t getting?

• Are there features that exist but are poorly implemented?

B. Experience Gaps: Is the user experience suboptimal?

• Are there inefficiencies in onboarding, ease of use, or customer service that your product can improve upon?

C. Value Proposition Gaps: Are they failing to articulate their value effectively?

• Sometimes a competitor's product is good, but their messaging is off. Can you clearly communicate your product’s value in a way that resonates more with users?

D. Innovation Gaps: Are they slow to innovate?

• Competitors who become complacent are ripe for disruption. Are there emerging technologies or trends you can capitalize on?

Once identified, prioritize these gaps by assessing their impact (how important is it to users?) and feasibility (how quickly and cost-effectively can you address it?). The goal is to find a sweet spot where your product can excel without over-complicating your roadmap.

5. Monitor Competitor Roadmaps and Adapt

Competitive analysis is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. Continuously monitor the market for updates on competitors’ roadmaps, new product launches, or shifts in strategy. Here’s how:

• Follow Industry News: Stay updated on product announcements, funding rounds, and executive changes in competitor organizations.

• Use Competitor Monitoring Tools: Tools like Owler, Crayon, or SEMrush can help track competitor news, website updates, and changes in their marketing strategies.

• Attend Conferences and Webinars: Hear directly from competitors about their future plans.

By keeping a finger on the pulse of competitors’ actions, you’ll be better positioned to react or even preempt them, giving your product a competitive advantage.

6. Case Study: How Competitor Gap Identification Led to Product Success

To give you a real-world example from my own career: I once worked on a mobile payments platform in a highly competitive market. After extensive customer interviews and a competitor feature analysis, we identified a key gap: while most competitors offered payment processing and integrations, they lacked a robust, easy-to-use rewards system for users.

We capitalized on this gap by developing a seamless rewards program tied to frequent transactions. The result? A significant increase in customer retention and engagement, which directly led to higher market share. Identifying that gap, which was less about technology and more about user experience, allowed us to differentiate meaningfully from bigger players.

Final Thoughts

Studying competitors isn’t about copying their features or merely playing catch-up. It’s about deeply understanding where they fall short and where you can deliver value in ways they haven’t imagined. By identifying these gaps, you’ll not only differentiate your product but also ensure that it continues to evolve in ways that anticipate and meet customer needs.

Ultimately, competition is not something to fear but to embrace—it pushes you to be better, faster, and more customer-focused. And in that lies the real opportunity for innovation and success.

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