How to Run a Competitive Analysis That Informs Your Strategy

Why Most Competitive Analysis Is Useless

The typical competitive analysis is a spreadsheet of feature flags. Product A has feature X, product B doesn't, you have both. Conclusion: you win.

This misses what actually matters. Competitive analysis isn't about features — it's about understanding why customers choose alternatives, what job they're hiring each product to do, and where the gaps in the market are genuinely unserved.

Done well, competitive analysis shapes your positioning, your roadmap priorities, and your sales narrative. Done poorly, it turns into copying your competitors' roadmap with a six-month lag.

Step 1: Map the Full Competitive Landscape

Start broader than you think. Customers don't just compare you to your obvious competitors — they compare you to doing nothing, to spreadsheets, to hiring someone, to a workaround they've built internally.

Direct competitors: Same customer, same problem, similar solution. These are obvious, but don't stop here.

Indirect competitors: Same customer, different approach. If you're building project management software, Excel is a competitor. So is hiring a project manager.

Adjacent competitors: Different customer or problem, but encroaching. Large platform players (Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion) often expand into adjacent territory. Know when they're likely to build what you've built.

Status quo: What does the customer do today without you? This is often your most important "competitor" in early markets.

List 10 to 15 alternatives. Then narrow to the 5 to 7 that matter most for your positioning decisions.

Step 2: Research Each Competitor Properly

Surface-level research produces surface-level insights. Go deeper:

Primary Research

• Use their product yourself. Sign up, go through onboarding, use the core workflow.
• Talk to their customers. Find them on LinkedIn, at events, in communities. Ask what they like, what frustrates them, and what's missing.
• Talk to churned customers. These conversations are gold — ask where they went and why.
• Read their reviews on G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot. Pay attention to patterns in negative reviews — these are the gaps.

Secondary Research

• Their pricing page tells you how they segment the market and what they value.
• Their job postings reveal what they're building next. A competitor hiring 10 sales engineers in enterprise is making a segment move.
• Their content tells you what problems they think matter to their audience.
• Their fundraising announcements signal how much runway they have and where they're going.

Step 3: Build a Positioning Map, Not a Feature Grid

Take the 3 to 4 attributes that customers most care about when making a purchase decision. These should come from customer conversations, not your assumptions. Plot competitors against these axes.

Common axes: price vs. capability, ease of use vs. power, breadth vs. depth, self-serve vs. high-touch.

What you're looking for:

Crowded corners: Where 5 competitors are clustered with similar positioning. Unless you're dramatically better, this is a hard place to break through.

Empty space: Where there are few or no competitors, and where real customers exist. This is where positioning opportunities live.

Forced trade-offs: Competitors who serve enterprise aren't serving SMBs well, and vice versa. Competitors who optimize for breadth typically sacrifice depth. These trade-offs create positioning openings.

Step 4: Extract the Insights That Change What You Do

Competitive analysis that doesn't change anything was a waste of time. Force yourself to answer these questions:

• What do we do that no one else does well? This is the seed of your differentiation.
• What do competitors do better than us today? This tells you where you need to catch up to be credible.
• What do customers wish any of these products did? This is your roadmap input.
• How does each competitor talk about the problem? The language they use — and the language customers use in their reviews — tells you how to frame your positioning.
• Who is their ideal customer, and who are they underserving? That underserved segment is often a better initial market than going head-to-head.

What to Avoid

Don't build what competitors have. Your roadmap should be driven by your customers, not by parity with competitors. Building to match is a permanent losing game — you'll always be one step behind.

Don't update the analysis once and file it. Markets move. Set a calendar reminder to revisit your competitive landscape every quarter. At minimum, check what your top 3 competitors shipped and who they hired.

Don't share it unedited with your whole team. Competitive anxiety is contagious. Give your team the insights they need to do their jobs without turning every standup into a competitor obsession session.

Competitive analysis is most useful when it makes your positioning choices clearer and your sales conversations sharper. If it's not doing that, it's just research theater.