Product Management Nanodegree — Day 10
Competitive Analysis
As part of competitive analysis, you’ll want to understand:
- Product offering and key features
- Differentiators
- Target customers
- Distribution channels
- Price points
products are doing the same job for the same segment (UBER — LYFT)
Products doing the same job but in different ways for different types of users. (SLACK -FACEBOOK MESSANGER) or tea and coffee they both have caffeine but coffee drinkers won’t select the tea.
People have a strong preference for one versus another.
Camera and iPhone (because it has a camera.)
Competitive analysis in its simplest form is identifying other similar products in the market, including the users, each product is targeting. At a high level, the competitive analysis includes:
- Looking at competing products in the market
- Understanding strategy behind competing products
- Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each product
- Anticipate shifts in the market and trends
Exercise :
I just made wearable fitness trackers for identifying the specific market but In the solution, instructor included both apps and watches.
MVP
An MVP, or minimum viable product, has just enough features to get early adopters excited. After launching an MVP, you’ll get a lot of feedback that will help you understand if you have product-market fit and what areas you should invest in next
To create an MVP:
- Start with the business model canvas
- Weigh against competing solutions
- Make sure it’s aligned with business objectives
- Translate to requirements
- Identify KPIs
By definition, an MVP is only must-have features.
MVPs allow you to build an early version of your product that you can bring to market quickly, in order to deliver value to user and get feedback that you can use to influence how you build the rest of the product.
Further readings
“When Eric Ries used the term for the first time he described it as:
A Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Here’s my stricter definition of a Minimum Viable Product:
A Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value (and as a bonus captures some of that value back).”
“The MVP business assumes that early product users see the promise of the final product proposition and stay loyal while providing useful feedback to guide the minimum viable product development team further.”
These days, the market situation is volatile and trends come and go quickly. The MVP tests your product with fewer risks in terms of time and budget resources.
Hence, the benefits of using the minimum viable product examples are as follows:
- Ability to test a product hypothesis with minimal resources
- Avoidance of the bigger failures and fund expense
- Checking real-life market tendencies
- Cooperation and hand-in-hand work with potential users in crafting the final product necessary
- Shortest time between product launch on the market and early adopters
- Gaining and expanding the user base
- Possibility to attract investors early
- Ability to apply for crowdfunding
- Continuous product development team learning and education
- Reduction of potentially wasted engineering hours
IPHONE
Surprised to see iPhone on the list? Well, you shouldn’t be. When Apple released their first version of the iPhone, it was lacking many basic functionalities. Copy-paste, for example. And I’m not talking about copying an image or a photo, you couldn’t even copy text. Next, search. Searching for your colleague’s email address shouldn’t be that difficult, right? Just put their name in the search field and… wait… there’s no search field? Yes, that was a reality for iPhone users. More than that, if you’d like to send an email and would start typing your friend’s address you’d expect some suggestions to pop up. Well… Not in your iPhone, tho. And I’m not done yet.
Do you like to be able to send a nice picture of a squirrel you met in a park on your way home to your partner? That would, of course, be really nice, but your iPhone doesn’t handle MMS… And iPhone 2G wouldn’t be able to help you either. Still no MMS… Okay, fine, since I’m not able to send an MMS, I’m gonna enjoy my walk home with some music on. And I really hate wires, so it’s time for my amazing Bluetooth headphones. Let’s rock it! Hm, how do I connect tho? What do you mean there’s no Bluetooth? Every smartphone has Bluetooth! Every, except your iPhone.
And please don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on Apple’s products. I love them, I really do. I just want to show you that you don’t have to build every single feature in your product’s MVP. Build the core, test if the market really needs it. If such titans as Apple are not willing to gamble, you definitely shouldn’t.
