Jay Haynes: 0:00

Welcome back to How would you beat where we discuss how you can use jobs to be done innovation methods to beat your competition. Remember to subscribe and like this podcast. In this episode, we will look at competitor analysis, including understanding competitors features, how should you analyze your competitors features? How can you tell if you are adding more value to your customers than your competitors, the only way to grow and create equity value is to win in your market and take share from your competitors. So competitive analysis is extremely important. So Jared, how to companies traditionally do competitor analysis?

Jared Ranere: 0:39

I would say the focus is on the features, What features does the competitor product have? And do? Does your product have all those features? And you know, one way I've experienced that is the email from the executive that says, hey, so as I just launched X, why don't we have that, which is a great moment in your career as a product manager, because then you have to scramble to figure that out and reply. And of course, this can put you in the classic feature catch up trap, where you don't have as many features as your competitors. So you go and build what they have. And by the time you're done, they've added more features. And so you're trying to do it again. And again. And this is especially difficult if you're under resourced in comparison to your competition, if you are the smaller player with less capital, and you're trying to get an edge. So how J might one break that pattern?

Jay Haynes: 1:35

Yeah, that's it's such a great analysis. And we've all been there. You know, if you've been on product teams, or even sales or marketing teams, or the executive teams, you're you're worried about your competition, they launch something and you think, oh, gosh, we have to go and match them. Or, you know, even worse, you might you might say, Oh, we just missed that feature look silly. So the question is, how do you know if you need to copy that feature? How do you know if you didn't need a different feature. And I'll just give a specific example, when I was a product manager, Microsoft, this was the state of the art of competitive analysis. In fact, I'm old enough that this was the software, we're still shipping in boxes. And you may or may not remember how old you are. That boxes software on the back had those little dot Charts, where it literally listed the features on the left, and you had a bunch of dots, and you showed your competitors. And it said, Oh, great, we have more features, we must be better than our competitors. So that that's very common. And it's very common today to where you know, different tiers of SAS Enterprise software, gives you more features as you buy up in more tears. And that's not necessarily bad. But if you if you look at this, from the point of view of your customer, what is your customer want? Well, we know your customer does not want your product, they want to get their job done. And they don't even want more features. They don't want a lot of options, what they want is you to get the job done for them. This is this is what's incredibly critical to any competitive analysis. Because if you're trying to understand competitor features, you really want to understand how that competitive product is getting the job done for the customer. That really is just fundamentally key. And we can use you know, tons and tons of examples to explain this, including our you know, classic, you know, iPod versus Zune, but also mp3 players versus streaming services, you know, versus record stores and cassettes, the reason that the innovations happen over time, and when you are analyzing the competitive platforms, you know, if you said, Oh, well, great, I must have the ability to buy music from a store and download it to my hard drive. Well, you're gonna miss the opportunity to get rid of the store altogether. And to get rid of Playlist creation altogether. Because what Spotify and Pandora before it who even you know, Pioneer this stuff, but even Apple Music now has it. You can just start streaming music that's related to what you you've listened to before and what you like, right? And that's because that is a great solution. When you're just trying to create a mood with music. I just want to quickly have your Apple Music or Spotify or Pandora, just just figure out another song that I'm going to like because I'm in this relaxed mood and I'm listening to Miles Davis, right. And there are fewer features. Yes, yeah. In fact, we love this example. Pandora literally had no features you push play, you typed in the name of the song he wanted you push play, it had thumbs up and thumbs down. But, you know, that was it. And it was you know, it was very successful. Now that model, that feature of that stream instantly has been incorporated into, you know, Spotify and Apple Music. Yeah. But that's such a good example of like if you were analyzing the competitive errors and you were looking at the iPods feature that is the wrong way to figure out if your competitor is going to take share. And that is what Microsoft did. They were like we match the features. In fact, they had more features. I love this example we talked about all the time. But it is ironic that the Zune had a podcast feature, it literally said, select your podcast on the Zune. So, you know, Spotify

Jared Ranere: 5:27

years later. So so if you're not going to just count the features and say, Well, we have to have that if our competitor does, what's the alternative? So you get the email from the executives, you know, your competitor just launched this, what do you do, I think it can be extremely helpful at that point to have a firm strategy in place that everybody's already agreed upon, right? Where you say, Well, this is the customer we're targeting. This is the job that we're trying to help them get done. And these are the struggles we're going to focus on in that job that we believe will drive growth, if we help the customer overcome those struggles. So then the first thing you can do is say, well, is that feature that the competitor launched targeting the same customer in the same job? If the answer is no, then it's pretty the quick answer is okay, that's, that's a different strategy. If we're questioning our strategy, now, we can spin up a work cycle to determine if that's a good strategy, and if we should adopt it, too. But at least we if we have confidence in what we already set our strategy to be, we can say, okay, let's not worry about that feature. Right, now, we're going to stay on the path of our strategy.

Jay Haynes: 6:37

Yeah, that's, that's so important, because any competitive analysis and any understanding of their features is effectively an input into your strategy, because a growth strategy that is going to create equity value, and you know, at the end of the day, you want to accelerate your growth and have higher valuation, multiples, and my exit multiples and all the all the good equity value creation numbers, that understanding competitors features is a way that you determine if your strategy is going to work. So strategy is about competition. You know, the origins of the term are how do you beat you know, if you have a chess strategy or military strategy, it is a plan to beat your competition. So what we know and just to review jobs theory a little bit, that the customer doesn't want the product, they want to get the job done, the job is very, very stable over the time, you know, people getting to a destination on time, it's the same job 100 years ago, as it was 100 years from now, whether you're trying to optimize cash flow, get a baby's sleep through night restore artery blood flow, all those are goals independent of any product or solution. So that's the basis of the theory. And every job is extremely complex has 15 to 20 steps and you know, 100 or so needs. So a strategy is prioritizing which steps need you're going to focus on. So that is a growth strategy, you are going to beat your competition by satisfying unmet needs better than your competitors. So your competitive analysis needs to start with having a growth strategy. And identifying this is a good market opportunity for us because there are enough customers in this market struggling to get this job done. They have these unmet needs, they're willing to pay to get the job done. And it's a big enough market. So starting with that foundation, then Jared, how do you do the actual competitive analysis and understand your competitors features?

Jared Ranere: 8:33

Right? So once you know the job that you're targeting, and you've broken it down into steps you can then look at, well, where does Where do our competitors play? In other words, what are the existing solutions that customers might use to get each job stepped on. And that exercise does two things, it tells you where your existing competitors play that you already know about your direct similar product competitors. It also opens up your mind to understand what you might call an indirect competitor, a very different product or a manual process that people are using to get steps done that you need to make sure you're better than we talked about that in just our last episode, where a company that was building an iPad application for people who worked on construction sites, overlooked paper blueprints and pencil as a competitor, and didn't build a product that was as good at that as that solution for that step. And lost to paper and pencil. Right. So yeah, so your competitors are not just similar products like the one you're working on. It's not just another app, if you're an app, it's whatever the customer is doing to get the job done. So once you have that in place, then you can start to look at, well, where can we win on this job? Where are customers still struggling in spite of the fact that there are solutions there? How bad are those solutions? You know, how fast and accurately do they get the step down? Or in this case, if the Markets unmet, they're how slow and inaccurate are they, and then that sets your baseline for how good you have to be. And if you have capabilities, and assets that can make you a lot better, or you know how to go acquire or partner to get those assets, or you can build those, then that's a great place for you to play. That's a great place for your strategy to sit. Yeah,

Jay Haynes: 10:20

I think that's, it's such a great way to describe it. And it does remind me of my Microsoft days. Because even if we, you know, Lotus was a competitor, I think that's how long ago was. But even if you had the feature and your competitor analysis, and your understanding of the competitors features, were based on this feature to feature description comparison, it was hard to tell, even if you had the same feature, it was yours better than their feature, right. And that's because there was no underlying, you know, baseline, as you called it with speed and accuracy. And we have to emphasize again, everything in the world, that is a successful innovation that creates equity value that drives growth, drives multiples, is helping a customer get a job done faster and more accurately. Now, the other element is you might do it at a lower cost, which is fine, you can have disruptive strategy or low cost strategy. But if it's if it's real innovation, going into a market to drive more customers to use your your product, it's going to do something faster and more accurately. And that's what's so powerful about speed and accuracy. Those are those are knowable metrics. And because the customer needs in a job are structured with an action and a variable, you know, when you're trying to get to a destination on time, you need to determine the optimal sequence of stops and determining the optimal sequence is the action. Determining is the action in optimal sequences, the variable so you can measure speed and accuracy. How fast can you determine it? And how accurate is when you determine the optimal sequence?

Jared Ranere: 11:59

Yeah, it's funny, you brought up a lotus. One of my favorite examples, because this is gonna reflect my age, but I know about Lotus Notes, but Lotus had spreadsheets to you, right?

Jay Haynes: 12:10

Yeah. 123. It was before Excel. It was the it was the dominant spreadsheet in the world. Yeah. So thinking

Jared Ranere: 12:15

about spreadsheets, you know, one of my favorite competitive matches in tech is Google Sheets versus Excel. And when Google Sheets launched, I'm sure there are a bunch of PMS, who got the email, it said, what are we doing about this? And it's really interesting to look at what is the competitive threat of Google Sheets versus Microsoft when it first launched because Google Sheets explicitly targeted the per personal users, right? Not professional users, it wasn't intended to be used for business jobs. It was it was used to, you know, organize your family around like a household project, or create a shopping list, right? This is their marketing message around this. And to make that easier, they made it easier to collaborate over the cloud. And it lacked a ton of features that Excel had. And, you know, I think Microsoft, a lot of people said that Microsoft can dismiss this. And the question was, well, maybe, right? Well, how do you figure that out? Can Microsoft dismissed that or not? And was it a good strategy to not just copy Google? And I think if you if you use jobs to be done, you can say, Okay, well, Microsoft's spreadsheet product is not excel is not focused on the personal user, it's a different customer. It's a consumer versus a professional user. So that's a different strategy. Right? And then the next thing you could say, well, like, what are the jobs that Google Sheets is being used for, and it's being used for totally different jobs, right? Consumer jobs are on organizing your family creating shopping lists, that Excel was not targeting Excel was targeting, you know, financial models for accountants and finance executives as their most premium customer plus a bunch of project management stuff at on the professional level in statistical analysis. And yeah, so on its face, because they Okay, those are different strategies. Now, I think the follow up question, which we talked about earlier is, okay, somebody's pursuing a different strategy with a relatively similar product satisfying different needs. Is that strategy good. Is it a threat to our strategy? So how do you answer that question?

Jay Haynes: 14:18

Yeah, well, it's a great question in this market. So we'll use Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, because it's a great example. So what that combines is disruption with jobs to be done. So just as a quick review, for anybody who doesn't know, disruption means that the current dominant player in the market is starting to over serve the market with effectively too many features complex features that are very high priced. So you are susceptible to a competitor who comes into the market and actually does a deal has fewer features is much lower cost. And the reason you know Clay Christensen obviously famously discovered this phenomenon, and a big part of that is Actually, because there are what are called non consumers in the market. And obviously, Microsoft dominated the professional world, you know, Excel was very, very expensive. And it was designed as a, you know, a large application where you could email files around, but you could not all look at cell A 47 together and comment on it, you know, collaboratively. Man, you know, I spent years getting emails with spreadsheets and you having to download them, open them, send it back, and, you know, type a version number in, like, you know, for a lot of stuff, as anybody you know, who's worked in companies probably has. So in that case, the strategy is to say, okay, that a spreadsheet can be used for a lot of jobs. It's a platform, as you said, you can make shopping lists data, or you can build financial models, or you can do statistical analysis for drug trials, or, you know, political polling or whatever I mean, it's spreadsheet is a calculator, it's a big advanced calculator. So you can use it for multiple jobs. So clearly, the strategy that Google was targeting was disruptive, they don't have the advanced financial analysis and statistical tools, they might have some of the more of them now. But they certainly it was just a lot more nose. But they're targeting exactly right, the people who are not collaborating on spreadsheets, because one, they're not going to buy Microsoft's you know,$350, Excel spreadsheet, or what it costs at the time, right? They're just, they're just going to use it as part of their Gmail for free. And they're going to collaborate with people, where they don't have to send a document around at all, it's all in the browser, it's all on the web. And that's going to enable you to do a lot of jobs collaboratively, where you have to do calculations, you have lists of things, you want to keep track of stuff, and you know, whatever way you want to, and that's, that's a great strategy. So they're targeting the needs of a different customer. So their competitive analysis would not be do we have the features that Excel has? Because that's very traditional, and they don't? So it would, it would be destined to fail? If if competitive analysis was based on feature to feature analysis, and understanding your competitors features relative to your features, you would say, as a CEO, no, don't invest in that we don't have those features. Right. But that would have been a mistake, because the market opportunity was a different strategy for consumers are prosumers, you know, SMBs, like just not corporate enterprises, and not detailed, you know, financial and statistical analysis. And those jobs are collaboration jobs. And you could say, well, what are the unmet needs in that collaboration job, and clearly, there was there were unmet needs to collaborate, because, you know, before Google Sheets, and and even Google Docs, their their word competitor was very similar it is that you cannot write a book with Google that we may be able to, but you know, it's basically like text, but you can collaborate and comment without emailing around a Word doc. So their whole office competition was around faster collaboration, and it is faster. That is an example where your competitive analysis and understanding your competitors features based on the collaboration job, would you would reveal Oh, yeah, this is so much better, because I don't have to upload the spreadsheet to my colleagues send it out to 20 of them, have them each download it, then each comment individually, then uploaded again. And then I got to go through everybody else's comments on 20 different versions of the spreadsheet and figure out what people are saying, now I just send them this URL link. And everybody's comments are nicely organized on the, you know, document or the spreadsheet. That's clearly faster and more accurate, if what you're trying to do is collaborate, you know, whatever job you want to call rat, rather than doing statistical analysis.

Jared Ranere: 18:52

Yeah. And I think so going back to that example, you're a pm at Microsoft, and for Excel, what do you what is your analysis of sheets at the time, you can say like, well, we're targeting a different customers premium willingness to pay, it's going to be a long time until Google threatens that. And I think that's turned out to be true, right? Google, Microsoft has preserved its revenue in that market for that strategy. And Google hasn't really taken too much share of that. The other thing you can do, though, is look at is that something we can pursue, right? Is there a market opportunity in that strategy that Google Sheets is pursuing that we should compete in? The second thing you can do is look at well, do our customers also have collaboration needs, right? Or do our premium customers doing different jobs have collaboration needs within those jobs? And if so, is that a position that Google Sheets can take to take some share for our from our market? So so having a sense of the job steps can help you see where the market might Don't move to threatened you. So it might feel like they're targeting a totally different customer. Totally different needs. But if your customer has those same needs, you have to keep an eye on it right? This is how you avoid the disruption as an incumbent is you try to have a sense of the whole job that the customers are trying to do. And when people are satisfying needs that are similar to the ones that you don't for your market. You have to pay attention to that, how could that come in and take a toehold in our market and then expand over time because it becomes a very large company with a lot of resources? And maybe they can get into our mode through this collaboration set of needs?

Jay Haynes: 20:42

Yeah, and I think that's a critical part of this, in the competitive analysis is defining the market. Yeah. So what you've just described there is very interesting, because Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, are targeting different markets. That's what's so interesting. Now, there's overlap, obviously. But when you're looking at this competitor analysis, and understanding your competitors features, you have to understand those features in a market. And the customers job is the market just like no one wants an iPod any more than they wanted cassettes, or CDs or records, they want to create a mood with music, no one wants a spreadsheet, No one wakes up and says I must have a spreadsheet, my life will be better if I have a spreadsheet, right? You must you wake up trying to do statistical analysis on a drug trial or, you know, having to model a financial model, you know, projected cash flow for creativity. Yes, exactly. Or, you know, create a grocery list, you know, those are all different markets. And the way to explain Google Sheets versus Microsoft Excel is those are different markets. So really interesting way to look at that, even though they're the same product. When you're doing the competitive analysis, you don't want to look at the feature to feature comparison, you want to say, okay, are all our our is our product roadmap, going to deliver value by getting the job done faster and market more accurately for the market we're in? Yeah. Now the second part of what you're saying is also interesting. Microsoft could then look and say, Wow, Google's got this new like Cloud, you can collaborate on a spreadsheet with not ever having to email it around or download it, right? That's pretty powerful. So would that be valuable in our markets? So for someone who's have those needs to do our customers have nose needs and similar needs. So when you're doing financial analysis, you know, when I was doing financial analysis, early in my career, it was me sitting at my desk, you know, solo, doing everything, and then sending it to my boss and getting yelled out. So it was, in other words, it wasn't so collaborative, as much as like Jay Gould, who's tuned in, right. So, but it should be collaborative, right. And certainly, in financial analysis, or, you know, statistical analysis, when, I mean, literally peer reviewed means you're collaborating, so you might want to send this statistical analysis around to your peers and have them all comment. So that's a good example of where those collaboration needs. Because the need and that kind of statistical analysis, I mean, the job where, let's say, we could say the market there is to determine the efficacy of a drug trial, right? Or a vaccine trial, right? You've got all these people, you know, taking new vaccines, or they're going to work? Well, you want to gain agreement on the efficacy, right, in order to then present it to the FDA, or whoever, your boss or whatever. And so that's a need that is obviously collaborative. And so if you looked at the speed and accuracy of Excel, okay, you put the data in Excel, you download it, you upload it to an email, you send it around via email to 20 people who then have to review it, then I'll give your comments, you know, obviously, having a web version of Excel would help you collaborate to get that drug discovery. But those are two different markets, right? That's where these big platforms are being hired into different markets by

Jared Ranere: 24:07

customers. That's right. Yeah. And I think another need we could talk about is assess the accuracy in the financial modeling job, assess the accuracy, and then revise the model to improve the accuracy that that reveals that involves a lot of collaboration. Yeah, so that's where if you're Excel, you can see, okay, if Google were to come enter our market with sheets, that's where they would get their toehold. So should we do that first? And how do you determine that? Well, you have to assess are people struggling with that need in our market right now? Or are they struggling with other needs significantly more and we can generate more growth by going after all their needs rather than the collaboration one right now? Now, as soon as you know that Google could do that, you have to it's a threat. You have to be aware of it but doesn't mean you have to act on it today. It might not be the highest priority need for your customers for your market at that moment. And so it's, it's, it's not a slam dunk No, or hey, it's right, assess it, do the analysis and figure it out. Yeah.

Jay Haynes: 25:14

And the other reason that in in your competitive analysis and understanding your competitors features, the reason it should start with your growth strategy is, you might want to ignore all of your competitors features entirely. So let me give you a specific example this and we've talked about this in our How would you beat Microsoft Word? Podcast. So let's take word and and Google Docs. So if you were to look at both and be like, gosh, I've got to create, if I'm going to compete with Google Docs and word, my competitor analysis is going to list both their features and try and understand how many features they have. That's, that's the kind of traditional analysis, right? Yeah. But if you if you then start your competitive analysis with your customers job. So Google Docs, and Microsoft Word are being hired for an enormous number of jobs, obviously. So enormous number of markets, and Microsoft word is still the dominant application for attorneys. Right? Good example, right? Huge market attorneys, obviously use Microsoft, they need to make Redline and revisions, they're going back and forth all the time. And Microsoft has a has a foothold in there. Right, you know, they definitely have a foothold you can do that kind of suggesting and editing analysis and Google Docs, you know, it's gonna take a long time to get those attorneys to switch. So how would you do competitive analysis in that situation for attorneys? Well, as we always say, the market for attorneys exists, because a lot of reasons, but people and companies need to resolve disputes. So that's an example of an enormous market. So resolving disputes dwarfs the word processor market by orders of magnitude, the the amount of money spoiled spent on it. So if you were to start your competitor analysis, say, Well, I'm we're gonna help people resolve disputes, because we want to help edit documents more, that is that's likely to fail, you know, unless maybe you're Amazon or someone you know, so big that you can, you know, you already have a billion customers, and you can just force them to use your spreadsheet when they're shopping. But, but if you're another company, you're trying to grow in the market for resolving disputes, you want to start your competitive analysis. Even before you're analyzing features in your competitors, you want to start that competitive analysis with a growth strategy that says, Where do people struggle to resolve a dispute? Who are the real customers in the market? And those are the people in companies that are in litigation, for example, and they're trying to resolve that dispute? And you might, you might eliminate the need for word processes or altogether, yeah, that that's such a good way to think about growth, because that's where you create real equity value. Yeah, in real acceleration, because you are now targeting the right customer with an entirely new product that eliminates the need to use a word processor altogether. That's

Jared Ranere: 28:09

right. I think one way to frame that is it's freedom from an overwhelming number of table stakes. Because if if you're if the customers you're targeting are currently using another solution, and you think, oh, geez, I better have everything that's in that other solution, in order to win, that's going to be an overwhelming number of table stakes, that will dominate your roadmap, and you'll probably never get there. But if you look at it, like our customers using this other solution, but we're satisfying different needs, and that solution does, you don't have to build potentially anything. Or you might just have a minimum number of table stakes that are dependent for you to satisfy that need that you're focused on. So it can really narrow it down. Yeah, I

Jay Haynes: 28:51

love another example. I love of this, we have ZocDoc where healthcare, obviously an enormously complex market. I mean, the ultimate domain is to optimize health for patients, obviously. But they looked at it at that market. And what they identified was a very, very, very specific need, and all they decided to do was satisfy that need. Was it soccer? Yeah, I think it was ZocDoc it was yeah, the scheduling. Yeah, yeah, the scheduling so that they realized that people couldn't get appointments. It's just really hard to schedule time consuming. You had to call away for callbacks and an email for an email, you know, go back and forth, you know, just like a huge struggle in this giant domain that's, you know, significant percentage of the economy and optimizing health and they could have tried to you know, boil the ocean and create like a new medical records competitive device, which you know, probably opportunity to that but they what they realize is okay, we're gonna focus we have a growth strategy that is entirely scheduling and and we're going to make it easier for the doctors to get scheduled and we're going to make it easier for the patients to get appointments and you know, as huge success And that that is where your competitive analysis, if it's driven by the customer, will lead to the very few things that you need to do well to be a success, you want to say no to a whole bunch of stuff, as you're saying, it seems like overwhelming table stakes like, gosh, how are we going to get into this medical device or miss our medical software business? We don't have any, you know, right expertise and building medical software? Well, okay, we're gonna do this one thing, because this, this is clearly an unmet need to schedule a doctor appointment. And that's laser focus. And I

Jared Ranere: 30:38

think one of the things that's interesting with that market, which I've never studied in detail, but I'm assuming the doctor's offices had some kind of scheduling software they used internally, whether it was, you know, Microsoft Outlook calendar, or some other robust, you know, specific to like, maybe the EMR provides an appointment scheduling solution. And that was probably what ZocDoc was competing with. And if they were said, you know, we have to build everything that the doctor solution has, in order to win in this market, they would have been in deep trouble with table stakes. But instead, they looked at it differently. And they said, like, well, the unmet need is actually on the beneficiaries part, which is the consumer, the patient who is the one who wants the appointment. And the competition, there's the phone. A really nice thing to compete with a telephone call.

Jay Haynes: 31:32

Yeah, but and again, your understanding your competitors features in that case, whether it's phone, or also, it's probably an assistant who's answering the phone and emails and trying to schedule and they're using, you know, Microsoft calendar, you know, Google Calendar, or whatever. Right. And, and, again, speed and accuracy in your competitive analysis is incredibly important. So the patient is obviously struggling, it's slow and inaccurate to try and get an appointment. And the doctor's office is also slow and inaccurate and incredibly wasteful. You know, these doctors, they got to fill out the forms, they got to get paid by insurance, they're going to make sure everything is classified, right, like a doctor's office is a complex, even a small one is a complex operation. So if you can say, Oh, you don't have to have a human schedule anymore at all right, your patients will automatically schedule our our app ZocDoc will get the job done for you. That is that always wins. If you can find those unmet needs. You You know what the growth strategy is because you're super focused on a customer a job that trying to get done, the steps and needs that are part of the growth strategy, and your competitive analysis is always against those steps and needs. Yeah. And I think that's a good way to summarize it in here, which is competitive analysis should be based on understanding the customer's job steps and unmet needs. And understanding your competitors features should be an analysis of how they're getting the job done. What speed and accuracy are they delivering for a baseline, and you've got to do a better job for the customer relative to your competitors. And that's how you accelerate growth and ultimately create equity value.

Jared Ranere: 33:10

Yeah, and if you can find jobs where the existing solution is a phone call, go after it.

Jay Haynes: 33:15

Yes, any manual solution generally means you can do it faster and more accurately. Great. Well, well, thanks for listening. Remember to subscribe and like this podcast. And if you want to learn more about jobs, we've done innovation methods, visit us@thrive.com that's T H R v.com.