Forget About Your Competition
I was recently having a discussion around a set of “This I Believe” statements that I’ve thrown together over the years and the statement…
“Focusing on competition is a waste of time.”
… came up as a point of discussion. It’s certainly meant to be a provocative statement – but it also needs to be followed with some deeper reasoning to fully understand what is underneath it. This is absolutely something I deeply believe, so I thought I’d take a shot at explaining myself in this blog post.
To start with, it helps to understand that I think that most enterprise software sucks. It’s a strong statement – but in my experience it’s true. There are many reasons for this – and as a general statement I think it’s hard to refute. Sure, there are scenarios and there are subsets that might not suck – but on a product-basis it’s rare that I would even say that an enterprise software package deserves to be labeled as anything beyond mediocre.
Feature-matching competitors is common practice in the enterprise software market. My observation is that this mentality leads you to building another me-too product and to enter a downward spiral of commoditization. When this happens then the market naturally becomes crowded, pricing pressures mount, and manipulations are used to push product. I don’t necessarily think that this is wrong – I just think that it “is.”
The tactic of focusing on competition is fine if you are in a market that is being commoditized and if you are focusing on playing the political game and supporting the “I won’t get fired for choosing X”-buyer. Honestly, this is the enterprise software game and the reality is that most companies will do this in order to continue to support growth projections. Typically, prices go down and differentiation becomes non-existent. As the spiral continues then competing on price and manipulations is all that’s left. The product and market have simply progressed along the diffusion of innovation curve.
As an alternative, I’d much rather focus on user goals. I can stand behind adding features and functionality to allow users to accomplish tasks that lead to fulfilling their needs. I think this approach is much more likely to get you beyond mediocrity and existing as just another member of the herd.
Simply stated, my preference is to spend my time trying to build great software.
I like the provocative statement. Specifically, I like that you chose the word “focus.” However, I don’t hear you saying that we shouldn’t *understand* our competition.
The last time I talked about “64% of features rarely used” (and expected a surprised reaction) was when a team said, ” We know. In fact, we’re surprised the number isn’t higher. We often put in features that we expect will never be used. If we didn’t, we couldn’t ‘check the box’ to get the gov’t contract. But we know what those features are and we don’t spend much energy on them. We spend more time and thought on the stuff that will set us apart and will get us the other customers.”
Focus is exactly the right word.