Product Operation: These 5 points will teach you how to do competitive product analysis!

Competitive analysis is a skill that is easy to get started with but difficult to master. It is an essential method for every user experience person and product manager. How to conduct competitive analysis from the perspective of user scenarios and product management? Let’s discuss it together.

Let me first tell you a little story. In this story, I want to express the necessary basic skills to do a good job in competitor analysis.

We often encounter some scenarios, for example, a product manager says with a sad face: I wanted to do something, but it was rejected by my leader.

A business person said: The leader said that we should do such and such. After hearing this, the role of leadership seems to become very scary.

Is this really the case?

Then let's analyze the leader in the description: "Leader" will receive various types of reports from subordinate departments every day, will take the initiative to pay attention to a lot of industry, domestic and international cutting-edge information, and will have more business perspectives; "Leader" needs to make many decisions every day. Therefore, he needs you, who is proposing a plan, to have a comprehensive perspective and provide valuable basis for his decision-making. So never misinterpret your "leader" because of the limitations of your own perspective.

Some people may say: I understand this principle, but what does it have to do with competitive product analysis?

It is very important. Your perspective determines your ability to propose solutions during the competitive product analysis process. This is basic skill. Only by having a business perspective, industry insight, and user perspective can you capture more valuable information during the competitive product analysis process, and effectively convince your leaders to facilitate the implementation of the plan.

Now that the episode is over, the most important message from the episode is: What kind of "perspective" you have is the cornerstone of your basic skills in competitive product analysis, and it affects decision-making and insight results in the entire competitive product analysis process.

The next step is how to conduct competitive product analysis.

1. People-oriented scenario analysis - You don’t understand me, so why do you ask me to understand you?

What if you don’t understand what users need? Why do you require users to understand what you are conveying?

Most of the poorly made products come from not understanding users and not drilling down from the user's perspective.

There are generally three reasons why users don’t have a deep connection with your product:

1. Failure to get the user's interests/points of interest, failure to attract;
2. The interaction experience is not friendly, and users give up midway;
3. Users themselves are not demand-driven - there is no perfect product. If the first two points are met, I believe the experience will not be bad.

So, what can users bring to the enterprise through this product?

The key point here is the scenario: when the user and the product intersect, the intersection becomes a touchpoint; when the touchpoints are connected in series, it is what we call a scenario . Touchpoints are more important than scenes, because if you don’t understand the touchpoints, you can’t string together high-value scenes.

After knowing the user needs/pain points, analyzing the touchpoints and outputting the scenarios, you can then carry out your further competitive product analysis.

2. Focus on ideas and seek conclusions - six undesirable principles

The methodology of competitive product analysis is not the most important thing. I plan to write about the methodology last and put the ideas first.

1. It is not advisable to start taking screenshots as soon as you pick up the PPT.
2. It is not advisable to assume that competitors always have the best perception.
3. It is not advisable to just take screenshots without analyzing them.
4. It is not advisable to just analyze without drawing any conclusions.
5. It is not advisable to just draw conclusions without planning.
6. A plan without focus is not advisable.

3. Competitive product analysis requires continuous accumulation of business/industry knowledge

Here I especially want to talk about the importance of learning, the importance of subjective learning :

• Spend 10 minutes every day quickly reading various types of information. Must-reads include: industry trends, domestic and foreign information, new business forms, and national policies;
• Spend 10-30 minutes every day experiencing/understanding your competitors;
• Spend 30-60 minutes every day to read what consumers are complaining about you;
• Ask yourself every day, have you made progress today compared to yesterday?

Don't always say you are busy, everyone is busy. No matter how busy you are, you will always have fragmented time. If these fragmented time can be used to absorb some fragmented knowledge and cognition, the accumulation over time will be quite terrifying. Some information that you think is unimportant will actually bring you value at some point in time one day.

4. Competitive product analysis from the shallow end to the deep end

The main process is as follows: (the yellow marked part is the key and difficult part)

▲Main process of competitive product analysis

Next, let’s focus on how to conduct competitive product analysis:

1. Determine research objectives

All things are difficult at the beginning, but competitive product analysis is just the opposite. It is easy at the beginning but becomes more difficult as it progresses. The core goal is actually to find opportunities to improve one's own products, and competitive product analysis is one of the channels for obtaining demand.

The key point here is to explore opportunities. There is a misunderstanding that needs to be corrected: "All competing products are good." You must never have this kind of thinking. Competing products also have many flaws that you need to discover. Moreover, the flaws of competing products are precisely your opportunities.

1. Select competitor

The key point here is: which competitor to choose? Why choose him?

Which competitor to choose?

——Generally, the number of competing products is between 3-5, including this product and 1-2 core competitors. You can also supplement them with excellent products from other industries or within the same industry.

Why choose him?

——It is the measurement of selection criteria. Usually, competing products can be identified based on some Baidu indexes, industry rankings, and business similarities.

1. Scenario-based competitive products

The premise of user-centeredness is to clearly understand the needs of users.

Starting from the needs, focusing on touchpoints and guided by achieving product goals, we output scenarios for competitive product analysis - the scenarios are simply translated as "user traffic flow".

If you want to do a competitive analysis of the product you are reviewing, what scenario should you start with?

——Focus on user scenarios and bring in the user's perspective. Taking the scenario of reading reviews as an example, you can easily extract the information that users are most concerned about when reading reviews through user touchpoints: there are reviews & there are high-quality reviews; around these two core concerns, look at how the product/competitor's products are doing. It seems that problem insight is not difficult at all.

▲User scenarios for evaluating products

Let’s continue with an example: The figure below is an analysis of user traffic flow in scenario-based competitive products. The user scenario is introduced in a channel page. It can be seen that the channel traffic flow is relatively complex, and users can easily get confused about where they are during use. The page hierarchy is too deep to distribute traffic quickly, which brings a high risk of loss (the image is blurred mainly to express the structure).

▲The dynamics of scenario-based user analysis

It’s not difficult to draw a motion diagram like the one above, but it can quickly achieve a comparison.

1. Output conclusion

A lot of things have been done before, but I often describe them as draft paper. The process of competitive product analysis is a process of learning and self-examination. Through such systematic learning and thinking, conclusions must be output.

However, when outputting conclusions, you must use more information to prove your conclusions or your guesses: data, user needs, business goals, etc.

Therefore, if you understand competitive product analysis as “taking screenshots and pasting pictures”, it means you are still at the entry-level product manager stage, and it is at best a trial period.

1. Presentation Report

In fact, the requirements for the speaker here are particularly high, because people who do competitive product analysis are immersed in it. He himself knows very well how to make various modules, but if he starts to talk at length with a PPT, it will be very tiring for the listeners.

Core of the presentation:

1. State clearly the competitive product goals, ideas, and structure;
2. Points of difference/your conclusion/reasoning for your conclusion;
3. Your plans and programs.

5. Extension based on competitive product analysis

Products have extremely strong life cycle management. The entire process from product planning to online operation requires continuous analysis of industry trends, product experience, and value. The process from nothing to something, from something to better, and from better to outstanding is not achieved overnight. It is a process of enhancing fission. The key to verifying success or failure is the user volume and the number of high-quality users.

This method mainly analyzes competitive products from the perspective of product experience. In actual work, roles such as visual design, interaction design, marketing, and product operations use this method to analyze competitive product experience. Although there may be differences in the focus points in the selection and analysis of competitive products, the general analysis ideas are the same.

Source: He Ling