[HN Gopher] Competitive Analysis for Engineers
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Competitive Analysis for Engineers
Author : staccatomeasure
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-05-03 10:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (staysaasy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (staysaasy.com)
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I've been blown away by how little engineers will know about the
| use of their own company's products, even the one they are
| working on. It's an area that companies could stand to do more
| training in.
| alvis wrote:
| This is what happens when you hire engineers who are not
| passionate about your product. Training doesn't help if they're
| not engaged.
| fsociety wrote:
| While I agree, I think at the same time companies prioritize
| engineers to work as fast as possible, so no slack time means
| no time to deeply learn the product.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's a tradeoff of course. The more time engineers spend in
| customer meetings, the less time they spend on engineering. The
| other thing I observed when I was more directly involved in
| such things is that you need to give them a good cross-section
| because otherwise it becomes "the one customer meeting I was
| in, they wanted $X so why aren't we doing $X?" See also sales
| rep discussions.
|
| You can summarize things based on research such as focus groups
| but it's less concrete than hearing about specific customer
| situations.
| XiZhao wrote:
| StaySaasy is my favorite tech blog of 2021. I am glad to see it
| on HN. I think their posts are a really unique and thoughtful
| corpus for a gap in thought leadership for scaling B2B
| engineering / product teams.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Don't disagree. Hard bit is knowing how to find that info out!
| ghaff wrote:
| >Hard bit is knowing how to find that info out!
|
| You'd have loved trying it pre-Web :-) I was a product manager
| in the late 80s/90s and I needed to do competitive analysis for
| pricing and feature prioritization.
|
| One of our sources of information was an analyst firm that
| basically collected faxes of product briefs from ourselves and
| everyone else and then basically charged us large sums of money
| to send us copies of the product briefs for relevant products
| because we couldn't ask for them directly.
|
| There was another firm that shipped us basically their own
| datasheets in a standard format of the products in a space
| (computer systems), which were often considerably
| outdated/inaccurate.
|
| I sometimes say if I had to go back to those days, I'd quit in
| a week as I basically wouldn't have the information to do my
| job.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >I was a product manager in the late 80s/90s and I needed to
| do competitive analysis for pricing and feature
| prioritization.
|
| I've only worked at one company that really went all-out on
| this. Samples were bought of competitive products, tear-downs
| and estimates on manufacturing cost, use of ICE-machines
| (where practical) to understand the underlying software to
| some extent. All in addition to studying usage, manuals, etc.
| Mid 1980's.
|
| I think it was really useful, but then they also had a QA
| department that was a peer to and practically as large as
| engineering.
| ghaff wrote:
| There were some firms like IBM who, I'm told, had massive
| competitive analysis teams including doing tear-downs, etc.
| We were actually a fairly large company (Data General) and
| we still didn't do a lot beyond talking with analysts who
| had mostly never touched the physical product--and
| customers of course. This was also a period when people
| went to events like Comdex and returned with literally a
| box (or boxes) full of paper.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| At least Tracey Kidder wasn't breathing down your neck.
| ghaff wrote:
| I joined DG a few years later than that though I knew
| many people in "the book" including Tom West who I sort
| of dotted line reported to for a time when NUMA servers
| were coming out. (For those who don't know what we're
| talking about, "Soul of a New Machine" is still one of
| the best books about product development ever written.)
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Not only do we have the web, we have app stores with public
| reviews! In addition to easily learning about the
| competition, we get to learn what their customers think of
| their own features. Pretty magical!
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm coming at this more from a B2B perspective.
|
| Certainly there were computer mag reviews of products and
| I'm honestly somewhat split on the transition from "expert"
| and theoretically unbiased reviews to a much more heavily
| crowdsourced set of reviewers. Not sure I'd call modern
| online crowdsourced reviews "magical."
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Mag reviews are definitely not the same thing as user
| reviews which are prompted during usage. If anything,
| expert reviews are useless.
| ghaff wrote:
| When magazine reviews were something that was a seriously
| paid occupation they were often pretty good. The problem
| today is that they're often essentially algorithmic.
| Reviews in e.g. the New York Times review of books insert
| were generally better than random Amazon reviewers
| (though not always).
| staysaasy wrote:
| Author's co-writer here - there are a few common ways to get
| this information from public sources. Public documentation,
| press releases, analyst reports from places like Gartner or
| G2crowd, field reports from a sales team in an enterprise
| business are some examples.
|
| Thanks for reading!
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| The phrase "competitive analysis" has a well-known meaning in the
| context of online algorithms.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It also has a different meaning in business. This blog is
| tailored to software requirements I think.
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