Episode 86: Dear Melissa- Answering Questions About Competitive Analysis, Stage Gates, and Aligning Around Lofty Goals
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about ways to research and stay on top of the market in order to conduct a thorough competitive analysis, when adopting a Stage Gate process makes sense and how to design it, and how to organize teams around the product strategy framework.
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Q: What tips do you have for competitor analysis?
A: Competitor analysis is definitely important when you're doing product management. Before we get into this, I will say that you don't want to copy your competitors feature for feature. You want to figure out why some people win and why some people don't with their different features… One thing that I do whenever I go to understand a company and I haven't had a chance to talk to their customers yet, I just peruse the web. If you go to G2 or Gartner, there are usually a lot of reviews from customers about those different products.
Q: What is your experience with Stage Gate? Am I just being stubborn and intractable by thinking that adopting Stage Gate is the opposite of creating a product led organization? Or, for example, a risk led organization?
A: It depends on how you’re developing your stage gates… Stage gates were designed to learn along the way. They weren’t designed to block people’s iterations or momentum from the product team… You are basically saying that in alpha mode, you're testing, you're making sure everything is good, you're making sure it's compliant, you're making sure that everything is great and you're doing that as well in experiment mode. This is the time to catch anything that might not be there and that's probably what your regulation people are looking for as well.
Q: In your experience, would it make sense for each squad to have its own challenge, or should there be one or two challenges for the entire product area?
A: You have this challenge, which is your overall really lofty goal, and you've got a smaller goal called a target condition. If you solve several target conditions, it should allow you to reach your challenge. It's basically like taking the big goal, breaking it up into smaller goals, and all the target conditions move you closer to reaching your challenge. When I have deployed this in organizations and when we have actually written out strategy, I find that there are about two levels of challenges in organizations, and that's what I talk about in the strategy framework.
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Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of dear Melissa today. We've got three great questions for you. Spanning a whole range of topics. One about doing competitor analysis. Another one about how do we pivot to being product led and then the last one about defining challenges in product strategy. So we're gonna dive into those in just a moment, but I wanna remind you that you can submit all of your questions to me too@dearmelissa.com and then every other week I'm answering these questions. So I will pick and choose a few of them to get back to you on. And I really enjoy that you are all submitting questions here. I think it not only helps me understand what you wanna learn about, but it also helps other people who are listening and having the same journey. So they get some good answers too. So thank you so much for everybody who's written in. And if you would like your questions answered. Remember dear melissa.com with that, let's go to the phones. First question.
Hi Melissa. Thank you for everything you do, I’m so helped by your work everyday in my work, than you for that. I’m from Toronto, or living in Toronto at the moment, I’m from Sweden. Anyway, I am doing some competitor analysis here at my company, and I’m wondering if you have any smart tips in this area. So I can of course find competitors online obviously, and read about them on their website and so forth, but how do I know more about more about them? Their technology, their solutions, their current and incoming features, their strategy, all of those things are internal. So how do product (although sounds like she said project?) managers spy on their competitors to find out what differentiators and what disruptors are looming out there? How do I stay up to date on a level that is more in depth than just checking companies’ websites? Thank you.
Thank you so much for writing in and what a great question. Uh, competitor analysis is definitely important when we're doing product management. Now I will say too, before we get into this, you don't wanna just copy your competitor's completely feature for feature. You wanna figure out why some people win and why some people don't with their different features. So, um, we do wanna keep on top of that though. Couple different ways. Uh, one thing that I do whenever I go to understand a company and I didn't have a chance to talk to their customers yet, although I want to talk to their customers, I just peruse the web. If you go to G2 or Gartner, there are usually a lot of reviews from customers about those different products. So for example, when I was joining the board of Forsa, I went and read all the reviews from people on Forsa on G2.
Um, I read about their competitors and a lot of people do reference in those reviews, too, what they love and what they hate about that product compared to other competitors. So that's awesome because that gives you a place to immediately start, try to dig in a little deeper, figure out what's going on. So I really love reading reviews that are just online and there's usually a lot of them too, without that though, or in addition to that, let's say, uh, another thing that you could do is look up at YouTube tutorials. So a lot of companies actually do demos and tutorials, and then they post 'em on YouTube. So that's a great way to go see what their products look like, how people are using them, how they pitch them, how they sell them head over to YouTube. Lastly, sign up for a demo. If you can, like, I, I would do, I would go and just use like my Gmail address or a different email address to sign up for a demo and see what it's like, pretend that you're gonna buy their product.
Uh, a lot of people do this. That's, that's how we find out what's going on there. So I would really try that. Uh, just, you know, use a different email address, say you're from a different company. See if you can get a sales demo, a lot of people would be doing sales demos for that. And, you know, give that a shot as well. So sign up for the demo, try to get in there. Another one too, if you're talking to your customers and they bring out how a competitor does things, ask them if they have access to that competitor. And if you could see it, so go to the sales team, sit with them and say, who are the new leads we're trying to get? And are they switching from competitors? Uh, can we sit with them and see what they like better about the other competitors?
Can we call them and, and sit with them and have them like screen share and figure out what they can do? Uh, I've done this a lot with sales teams and usually people are happy to share what they like about competitors, what they don't like about your product. So that's a great way to get up to speed on that as well. So I look at those types of things first to see <laugh>, if you could do that, um, if, see if you could spy on your competitors and when you're trying to stay up to date too, you it's, it's hard. Like, I, I have a lot of people who subscribe to Google alerts in the industry or about competitors. So if they're gonna release something new, you can do Google alerts and be notified like, Hey, a new feature is coming out from our major competitor.
We should get on that. Things like that will keep you, uh, there. So you don't feel like you have to just go search all the time, all the time, all the time. Um, otherwise too, I would say it's good to review what your competitors are doing periodically, but you don't wanna get super bogged down by it. I've also seen a problem where a lot of companies, as I mentioned earlier, uh, just go copy with their competitors are doing. And they're so, so obsessed with figuring out what their competitors are doing and trying to catch up or copy them that they forget, like they have their own product vision. And if your vision isn't to differentiate from your competitors, like there's no differentiating factors in there, that's a problem. So you definitely wanna keep up to date with your competitors, see what they're doing and see where they're winning, but you also don't wanna lose sight of what you are doing and why you win.
So it's not a game of just copy, whatever is out there. And I have personally worked for a lot of companies that have done that. Just copying whatever's out there. You wanna make sure that you're staying true to your vision. Um, but you're taking good ideas where they do come. And when people say they like something better, gotta respond to that. So definitely good to do competitor analysis, but don't let it consume your whole day. Right? Definitely set some time, you know, for it probably every quarter, a couple hours to peruse and figure out what's going on. Uh, those things are absolutely important, but remember to stick, stay true to your vision.
All right, second question, dear Melissa, I work for a successful profitable FinTech, a bank currently undergoing hypergrowth. We operate in a scrum environment with multiple releases a day across a growing number of teams. 12 at last count, the company is trying to pivot to being product led while ensuring that all regulation governance requirements are met. To this end, they have adopted stage gate, which seems to me to be waterfall in a box, but I have not encountered it before. What is your experience with stage gate? Am I just being stubborn and intractable by thinking that adopting stage gate is the opposite of creating a product led organization or for example, a risk led organization. Great question. Okay. So stage gates are actually good. They're fine. You want stage gates, but I guess also it depends on how you're developing your stage gates. So let me tell you what good looks like, because I don't know what your stage gates look like, and you can probably refine it to be here.
Um, when I was at Athena health, we had to implement stage gates and that was good. It was about how we were gonna roll out products and testing to larger audiences. We worked in a, you know, we worked in the medical field. We, uh, were serving doctors and nurses and hospitals. When you do a big bang release for doctors and nurses in hospitals, and they don't know how to use it, or something goes wrong, like that's somebody's life on the line. So you don't do that. So we didn't do that. And what we had to do was refigure our stage gates so that we could still be agile, still be testing things, but we were making sure that we weren't risking, you know, people's lives. And that is good practice in anything that is highly regulatory, Amazon, and Google can just throw things out there, AB test it.
It's usually not harming anybody sometimes I'm sure they have riskier things, but when you're in a regulatory environment, you can't do that. And that's totally fine. It doesn't mean that you're not agile. Remember agile is about responding to change. So we wanna design our stage gates so that we are able to learn and respond to change. So what did we do? We broke things into different stages of development for our product. So, you know, you had in development. Um, but then the first release would probably be around an experiment that we were doing. So we would call it experimentation phase, um, which meant there was like a 90% chance. We're not sure that this is gonna go through. Uh, we told that to sales. We told that to anybody who may have been reviewing it. We said, we're just getting feedback at this stage. It's not going live.
Totally cool. Everybody around the organizations aligned by that. And then we had alpha beta and generally available. alpha meant that we were testing things with a couple hospitals or a couple doctors just to make sure it worked. The UX was good. The solution looked really nice. Um, it was intuitive and it solved the problem. That's what we were really looking for. Still a chance that we're not gonna release that at the end of the day, we're being iterative. We're gonna refine it after that, get that feedback. But we're definitely not releasing that solution, even though it was coded. And it was pretty much a full solution that doesn't get released to everybody because we don't know if it solves our problems yet we have to test it. We have to make sure people are using it correctly, and we wanna iterate on it in it in a low risk way.
Um, so that we can not have an epic fail if it's not working by releasing it to everybody. Beta meant it was pretty good to go and we're pressure testing it at scale and making sure that things worked. So then we would release it to a growing number of people, probably like 10 to 20% of the customers that we had. And then GA meant it's generally available for everybody's release to everybody. Now, when you're thinking about these stage gates, we're learning along the way they were designed to learn, they weren't designed to like block people's iterations or momentum from the product team it's designed for the product team to learn. Um, but it also does reduce the risk of the whole organization, which is anything that, you know, any organization like you and a bank or in a highly regulated industry, you're gonna have to deal with that.
And that's totally fine. We just work around those constraints. So we are basically saying that in alpha mode, we're testing, we're making sure everything's good. We're making sure it's compliant. Um, we're making sure that everything is great and we're doing that as well in experiment mode, but this is the time to catch anything that might not be there. And that's probably what your regulation people are looking for as well. What's their opportunity to catch things before it goes live to everybody. So I, what I would do, and I don't know, like I said, don't know what your stage gates look like, but if they don't sound like that, um, sit down with your regulatory team and your sales team and everybody else. And start to define that, start to define it from a product perspective of how you can learn and how you can manage risk while learning, right?
Because you want to make sure that they're not preventing you from releasing it to anybody or testing it with anybody that's bad. So if you have a stage gate like that, that wouldn't be great because that means that, you know, you're not getting the feedback you need to make sure it's successful. So I would sit down and discuss like what you need from your end, what they need from their end and try to come up with a good compromise so that you can test it in smaller, less risky ways. So again, don't make this don't think that this is just a risk led organization. There is risk inherent in every organization. There's a risk of failure, but when you are in a highly regulated industry like banks, healthcare, I've worked with insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, all of those things, uh, yeah, you've got like a lot more on the line here.
So you're gonna definitely have requirements and regulatory, um, you know, things that you have to be beholden to. And that's cool. Like we just accept that they're there, but you wanna look at those two as how do, how do they help me manage risk? Not just how are they blockers for everything that I possibly do and good leaders in organizations as well, see compliance like that. They see compliance as, um, you know, things you have to do, uh, and lawyers as people who advise on risk, but at the end of the day, it is your decision and the CEO's decision and leader's decisions about how much risk you're willing to take on. So try to think about stage gates as an opportunity to learn in low risk ways, rather than, uh, as a, you know, handcuffs for you not being agile. Agile is all about getting things in front of customers. So as long as your stage gates don't prevent that. You're okay. All right. Last question we've got for today.
Dear Melissa. My current challenge is to align the company around a clear product strategy, and I just got the green light to apply your frameworks to do so. I'm a VP of product. Our product team is around 70 people, organized into eight squads each with its own domain, onboarding operations, recurrence, churn, et cetera, in your experience, would it make sense for each squad to have its own challenge or should there be one or two challenges for the entire product area? Of course, I'm using challenge as defined in several of your blog posts on product strategy. Thank you for putting out such great stuff and looking forward to hearing from you. All right. Well, good question. And I wanna say too, that I've changed this a bit over the years in the most updated version on my thinking of this is in my book escaping the build trap.
And I just saw your little note that you got it in just a few days in Chile. That's pretty awesome. Uh, I really hope you enjoy it. So, uh, when I started writing these blog posts about product strategy, I was following terminology that was very beholden to, well, that was developed for Toyota kata and Toyota kata is still underlies everything that I talk about when it comes to strategy and the Prota COTA. And what they talk about in kata is that you have this challenge, which is your overall really lofty goal. And you've got, um, a smaller goal called a target condition. And if you solve several target conditions, it should allow you to reach your challenge. So it's basically like taking the big goal, breaking up into smaller goals and all the target conditions move you closer to reaching your challenge. Um, when I have developed like deployed this in organizations and when we have actually written out strategy, I find that there's actually like about two levels of challenges in organizations.
And that's what I talk about in the strategy framework. So we have our vision of where the company's going. Then we have our strategic intents, which are the challenges on a business level. So what are the really lofty pushes that we're gonna make as a, as a business that we wanna solve to further our, our journey to the challenge. So these are things that are really lofty, like expanding geographically, um, you know, completely revamping parts of the business to innovate or, you know, go after something new, um, solving new problems that we haven't solved yet, like really, really lofty business challenges that don't just affect the product team. They also affect the sales team, the marketing team, everybody. So you're all aligned under strategic intents across the organization, which is awesome because then it stops that infighting between, you know, sales and marketing and product.
And I have these goals and you have this goals. It's like, no, we all have the same goals and that's how a company should run. So underneath that though, now we go into just our product strategy and sales has their strategy. Marketing has their strategy and they should all align, but like, here's our product strategy of what we're gonna build. Now we've got, um, if you're, you are a product manager on a team, let's say your challenge is gonna be a product initiative. And that's what are the problems that we can solve from a product standpoint, from a software standpoint for our customers. And these are gonna be really large push initiatives, um, that are very problem focused. And that is then gonna be broken down into the outcomes that you wanna solve from a feature perspective and the different solutions and features in the team that will solve and roll up into that challenge.
Now, when you think about the team level product initiatives, which are the challenges, right? So usually they're set by VPs of product and directors of product with input from the teams, um, on where to go big pushes and usually multiple teams will roll up into that product initiative. So you could think that it could span 1, 2, 3, 4 teams that's that's normal. Like you want to make sure that multiple pushes on the product team are rolling up into a really good, big push on a product perspective. Uh, so that's really where you wanna look at, and then those roll up into the strategic intent. So if you've got three initiatives, they should align back to strategic intents, they can align to multiple strategic intents. So it's totally fine if you're like, Hey, this initiative will increase our, you know, our retention of X, Y, Z type customer, but it's also going to open us up into this new market that we're trying to move into.
And we believe that we can get like, you know, 800 million of new sales for that. That'd be great, 800 million of new sales, but, uh, you get what I'm saying? Like it rolls up to multiple initiatives. That's okay. Um, that just makes, you know, you wanna prioritize effort in to that definitely. Um, depending on how long it's actually going to take. So that's how I would think about how things roll up now at the strategic intent level at the company level, this is a little controversial, but I say that you can't really have more than three. Why you, these are huge, lofty, lofty goals for the business. It's like, what's organizing a huge part of your budget, your strategic budget, right? I'm not talking about like everyday things. I'm not talking about operational stuff. I'm not talking about tech debt. I'm not talking about keeping the lights on this is strategic pushes and what we're allocating for a budget towards a strategic push across the entire organization.
That's what strategic intents are. Um, the stuff about like tech debt, other things like those are operational and there should be a portion of your budget associated to it. But that's a larger conversation about portfolio planning of how much money do we wanna spend on strategic stuff versus how much money do we have to spend fixing our things. Once you go through that, now we look at the strategic intents, which are purely strategy based like growing our company. Now, when you look at those three is a lot for a company. Three is normal. I've seen a lot of companies do six or seven. I've seen them do six or seven across like many different types of organizations in the company and they don't have anything overarching. It's gonna distract people. You're gonna create a lot of infighting between different, um, divisions in your organization. Like you wanna keep it simple.
You want people focused. And that's the key to this framework is to provide focus. What are we not doing? What should we be working on? And you should only change it when you reach that goal. And I would say like, update it immediately, like put another goal in there, have something waiting in the wings or like, and you finish that initiative. It worked it's great. Or, um, when something massive happens, like things like COVID now you're gonna have to probably change your strategic intent. That's totally fine, but like, you need to do it, uh, intentionally. That's why they're called intents. And you have to do it in a way where it focuses the entire company. So you as a VP of product should be able to go over to the VP of sales and have a great conversation about where you are focusing on to help them unlock the sales that reach those company goals.
Um, and you should all be aligned around the same metrics there and the same goals there. And what you'll see is it brings the whole executive team together. So that's really what I want you to think about. And it sounds like you are, uh, a company that is very software focused. So think about how software, um, can enable these strategic intents, think about how it enables the business to do better and be better. That's really a secret for success here. All right.
All right. That's it for this episode of dear Melissa. And I wanna remind you, leave me some questions. We have this wonderful voicemail feature, and I love it when you can leave me a voicemail. And I will also say that right now, we're trying to get more of them. So we're prioritizing them. So if you want your question answered faster, please leave me a voicemail and let me know what you're thinking, what you got questions on. So dial in, let us know, go to dear melissa.com and definitely do that. And if you enjoyed our podcasts as well, we really appreciate it. If you could leave us a review on apple podcasts, um, head over there, uh, give us a good review and we will really, really appreciate it. Uh, in the meantime, I hope you guys have a great week and we will be back and we will be back next Wednesday with another episode of the product thinking podcast.