You're (probably) doing competitive analysis wrong
Most teams track outputs. Winners track inputs.
Your team tracks every feature your competitors launch. You analyze their pricing shifts, monitor their job postings, and keep tabs on their marketing campaigns. Yet somehow, their strategic moves still catch you off guard.
Why? Because you’re watching their outputs when you should be studying their inputs.
Most product teams fall into the same trap: They focus on what competitors are doing rather than understanding why they’re doing it. This reactive approach means you’ll always be one step behind instead of one step ahead.
What most teams track
Most teams track feature releases and product updates, pricing and packaging changes, marketing campaigns and messaging, and hiring announcements. That’s usually where it stops.
But I want you to think bigger.
What teams should track to gain a competitive advantage
You should also track this:
Customer complaints about your competitors
Patterns in their experiments
Changes in their success metrics
Shifts in their target market
Internal incentives (if you can)
Go deeper. Understand their strategic bets. Figure out what drives their decisions.
This approach gives you a real strategic advantage. When you understand the “why” behind competitor decisions, you can predict their next moves and position your product better. You’ll learn about their strategy and see their possible moves even before they ship anything. By watching your competitors’ inputs closely, you gain insights without running every experiment yourself.
Reverse engineer their actual strategy
The ultimate goal? Fill your strategy template with your competitors’ actual data. This way, you’ll understand their real strategy, not the polished version they show publicly, and compare it against your own. That’s when competitive intelligence becomes truly powerful.
What I Read
As usual, I will list some of the best articles I read on the Internet. I will keep a list of the best articles (currently >800) at https://www.digital-product-management.com. These are today’s picks:
No AI without Evaluation Systems: How are we measuring if this thing actually works?
Archetypes of Product Leaders: The craftsperson (“it’s all about the product”), the operator (“it’s about scale”), and the visionary (“it’s about the future”).
Product Strategy Framework: A good set of standard documents for your product strategy.