Basic skills for beginners: What exactly does competitive product analysis analyze?

The in-depth analysis behind the product functions is the embodiment of the value of competitive product analysis . At the same time, I believe that this process is also a rethinking of one's own products.

I saw this old question on Zhihu, which asked how product managers conduct competitive product analysis. There are many answers to this question, but they are nothing more than some routines and fixed templates. I was deeply touched by this. When I first entered the industry, I also agreed with most of the above answers . At that time, I also believed that competitive product analysis was to analyze the product's positioning, operational strategy, information architecture and even interactive vision, etc. I also liked to dismember a product and analyze it layer by layer from its strategic level, scope level, structural level to performance level, and finally output a perfect report with various charts, various data, various comparisons, and a few God-mode-type conclusions.

In fact, if you think about it, does such an analysis report really make sense?

I don’t know since when, competitive product analysis has become a necessary basic skill for beginners. All new students use a beautiful competitive product analysis as a stepping stone to get their dream offer. It’s not that I hate this kind of behavior. This kind of beautiful product dismemberment report can indeed show a person’s logic and so-called product sense. But I think this kind of thing is useless except for interviews.

I think the greatest benefit of competitive product analysis is to understand your competitors and users better.

Many people are accustomed to analyzing a product as a whole, which I think is incorrect. There are two reasons:

1. The formation of a product definitely involves various complex relationships and cannot be simply analyzed on the surface. It is one-sided and even inaccurate to hastily analyze the macro level such as strategy, industry, direction, etc.

2. A product must have core users, secondary users and marginal users, so some functions will be designed to satisfy secondary users or even marginal users. It is inaccurate to analyze them together without distinguishing them.

The correct approach is to first identify a behavior and then analyze how competing products satisfy this behavior.

Competitive product analysis is to analyze a certain behavior that is satisfied in a product. Taking a behavior as the starting point, it analyzes what types of users’ needs are satisfied by certain functions in the product in what scenarios.

The process of analyzing behavior is to first analyze the users, then analyze the scenarios, and finally correspond to the functions of competing products. However, in competitive product analysis, since there are already finished functions, we need to work backwards based on the functions to determine what types of users and in what scenarios the functions meet.

For example, let’s analyze the two products, Meitu XiuXiu and Snapseed.

First of all, both products meet the biggest demand, which is image processing. We conduct analysis based on this behavior.

Next, we need to classify user groups based on their behavioral tendencies. We can simply divide them into:

Recorder: Taking photos is to record life. They do not have high requirements for the quality of photos. They just need to record things quickly and occasionally beautify the photos. Most of the elders around us may belong to this group.

Sharer: The purpose of taking photos is to share beautiful things with people around you. They have certain requirements for photo quality, but their professional level is not high. They just have a certain sense of beauty. Most of the friends who like to post on WeChat Moments frequently may belong to this group of people.

Professional: Taking photos is a hobby. They have certain photo shooting and processing skills, and like to tinker with different shooting methods and photo adjustment methods. Most of the friends who study SLR in life may belong to this group of people;

Next we can work backwards based on the function:

The one-click beauty function of the beauty camera satisfies the need for users to quickly beautify the scene of their selfies or when taking photos while traveling;

Snapseed provides highly professional and adjustable image processing functions to meet the needs of professionals who need to optimize or re-create photos after taking them.

Next, we analyze these two products. It is obvious that the core users of BeautyCam are sharers, while the core users of Snapseed are professionals. Neither product considers recorders as the core user group, because the camera that comes with the mobile phone can largely meet the needs of recorders , but both products provide some basic functions for recorders...

By analogy, each function can analyze the corresponding population and the corresponding scenario, and then discuss around the following points:

What is the purpose of designing this function and how does it correspond to real-life behavior?

Analyze which functions are designed for what types of users and based on what scenarios?

Which features are targeted at core users and which features satisfy secondary users?

Why does this product regard this group of users as core users?

Why do we consider such scenarios most often?

If we dig deeper, we can also think about whether such a function is designed based on human needs, and which small improvement might be designed to meet what purpose? What is the meaning behind such behavior? And so on and so forth.

The above is just an example, so it is not complete. Please understand what I mean.

Such an in-depth analysis of the corresponding product functions is the embodiment of the value of competitive product analysis. At the same time, I believe that this process is also a rethinking of one's own products, checking for omissions and sorting out one's own ideas. I think this is also the meaning of "learning from competitors".

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