Have you ever been in a situation where you develop a feature because your competition was supporting it, and once you have launched it, your competitor withdrew it?

It happened to me. But what also happened was something even funnier.

Many times in my career, I have followed the urgency to develop a feature, reacting to the competition. I analyzed the competitor’s functionality. I defined how it should match my product. I groomed it with teams, and I defined the MVP and potential subsequent iterations.

However, sometimes your biggest enemy can become your best friend — limited resources.

Once, I had to postpone developing a competitor’s winner for a month. There was a disappointment due to “the significance of the feature for the market,” but we had to live with it.

A couple of weeks later, the frustration decreased.

The competition had withdrawn the feature.

Competition Tracking

Competition tracking is a significant aspect of product and innovation management. One of your competitors will sometimes come up with the idea that it will become a standard in your market. However, before you decide to copy a feature, I propose to ask yourself a set of questions:

• Do you have data supporting that this functionality provides a competitive advantage to your competitors?
• Do the problems this feature solves impact your unique vision and strategy? (Because if you do not impact at least one, you have something more important to worry about than just a feature)
• Will this feature help you to attract a significant amount of ‘loyal-to-your-competitors’ users?
• Will this feature significantly increase the usage and satisfaction of your existing customers?

And more importantly:

• Do you have any ideas worth building that no one else had until now?