From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

Introduction to finding competitors

From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

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Introduction to finding competitors

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- Hey guys, welcome back to the course. So last lecture we learned about sizing up your market, that's important because you really need to know about the opportunity that you are sizing up, and the relative importance of that opportunity versus your other opportunities. Project management is all about making decisions between opportunities. So that's how big it is, but you want to know something that's even more important than the size of your market? The competitors in your market, and that's what we're going to be talking about in the rest of the section. Now there are a lot of different market circumstances that could happen with regards to competitors. You could be going into a big market with your new product or new feature, and that big market could have lots of competitors. You could also be going into a small market and that could have very few competitors, or it could be the other way around. We need to know how to collect information on those competitors and make an objective judgment about what that means for our new product or feature. Being able to make this type of analysis and decision is crucial to being a product manager and crucial to being an entrepreneur. Now if you're going into a market or growing into a market that has a slew of different competitors that all do things very similar to what you're proposing, some of them do the exact same thing, and some of them do what you're trying to do but better, that's something that you need to know long before you actually engage your development team and your company resources in tackling that opportunity. Similarly, if you have a market that appears to be wide open, no one seems to be doing what you are proposing to do, you also need to be able to make a critical decision. Now remember, that's a weird scenario, there's two sides to that coin actually. Is it that case that no one doing what you're proposing because you're such a genius, you're the first one to come up with the idea, you Steve Jobs you, or is it the case that no one else is doing it because there's no customer demand and they all figured out that it was a bad idea on their own? Now as a product manager, you're going to have to be in charge of feature triage. That basically just means that you're going to need to know which potential opportunity, feature, or project is most likely to, one, get you more users, two, make your users happier, and three, enhance your brand, and as an entrepreneur who's managing their own product, it's the exact same, you need to know which opportunity is the most likely to get you your returns that you want so that you don't waste a lot of time and resources, and you can't make that call unless you know what your competitors look like, what they're doing, and what they currently offer, so we're going to cover that throughout this entire section. First off, we're going to start with finding the competitors because we can't make a critical judgment unless we know what we're making a judgment on. So see you in the next lecture.

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