In product craftsmanship – or any market offering – the importance of feature analysis and competitive awareness is a no-brainer: these are the lifestyle. If not, you’re in the wrong job.
Yet, it seems like I watch good people driving good products excuse themselves from “competitive analysis” (“It’s too much work, and not enough value”) as well as meaningful “feature analysis” (oddly, identical reasoning), and they swim in that middle-stream naiveté that “smart people” and “great execution” can prevail.
Like the bank teller at home, counting his own cash on the kitchen table, I was recently reconciling my own “competitive analysis (with feature breakouts)” and my “master feature list (with competitive footnotes)” when it dawned on me, that I am in the business not of “product management” but rather, “compartetive entrepreneurship” …derived from comparative – competitive. No feature idea lives in a competitive vacuum, and vis-à-vis.
Compartetive? Hmm.
Okay, I’ll be the first to say it lacks the poetic intrigue of “coopetition” – yes. But now that I’ve begun writing it into my document titles (as of 5:15 pm, in place of comparative feature analysis / competitive analysis)… "compartetive analysis" is capturing it for me in a new way, and opening my eyes to the whole point of the exercise. This is what we’re in the business of doing – the essence of the commercial competition. Or, user-experience sculpting. (It's a sculpt-off...)
Comparison and competition merge exactly where analysis lives. I guess this is where an Internet entrepreneur lives, too: like an apple-orange, fishing for any bite.
[photo: Worth1000.com, Chris]
justapersona
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