As product managers (PMs) and product marketing managers (PMMs), you’re probably used to drawing most of your insights from users—their feedback helps shape your product roadmap, marketing strategies, and overall growth. But what if you could learn just as much from your competitors?
Staying ahead in the software world isn’t just about meeting user needs. It’s also about keeping an eye on what the competition is doing. You can learn from their successes, avoid their mistakes, and understand where there are gaps in the market.
In this glossary, we’ve put together key competitive intelligence terms. If you are just getting started, we hope these concepts will help you be more strategic.
A Competitor Battle Card is a concise, tactical tool used primarily by sales teams. These cards highlight strengths, weaknesses, product differentiators, and common objections, giving sales representatives the knowledge they need to respond confidently to prospect concerns.
Battle Cards are most effective when created with input from product and marketing teams. Product managers (PMs) provide insights into product capabilities, while product marketing managers (PMMs) focus on customer pain points and positioning.
Without Battle Cards, sales teams may struggle to respond to competitors' strengths or address concerns about missing features. These cards provide a clear strategy to differentiate your product, helping sales teams close deals faster and more effectively.
Competitor Battle Cards typically include:
During a sales call, a prospect brings up Competitor X’s advanced analytics feature—something your product doesn’t offer.
Without a Competitor Battle Card, your sales rep might scramble for a response. But with the card in hand, they can quickly see how to handle the situation: it highlights Competitor X’s focus on complex analytics and contrasts it with your product’s strength—speed and simplicity.
💡 Pro Tip: Use Win/Loss Analysis to enrich your Battle Cards with data from past deals, ensuring they reflect real-world competitive outcomes.
Competitor Benchmarking is the practice of comparing your company's products, services, and performance metrics against industry standards or specific competitors to gain insights into where you stand in the market.
When you live and breathe your product everyday, it is sometimes difficult to understand how your product measures up against competitors. Competitor Benchmarking helps you:
By knowing where you excel and where you need improvement, you can make informed decisions that drive product development and marketing strategies.
Competitor Analysis is the process of evaluating your competitors’ products, marketing strategies, and overall market positioning to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
This in-depth assessment helps you understand where your product stands in relation to competitors and informs strategic decisions.
For PMs and PMMs in startup and smaller software companies, Competitor Analysis can often feel like a daunting task—there’s never enough time, and information can become outdated quickly.
Despite these challenges, understanding your competitors is crucial for identifying gaps in the market, avoiding costly mistakes, and staying competitive.
Competitor Analysis typically involves collecting data from a variety of sources like competitor websites, press releases, product reviews, and customer feedback. You'll analyze:
If you find that a competitor’s messaging heavily emphasizes their product’s speed of deployment, while your product is more feature-rich but takes longer to implement, this insight can guide how you position your product against them. Highlight the depth of your feature set to target customers who to customize their solution completely.
💡️Pro tip: Don't just monitor direct competitors—keep an eye on adjacent industries or companies offering complementary products. They can reveal emerging trends and features that might soon become important in your space, giving you a first-mover advantage.
Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering, analyzing, and acting on information about competitors and industry trends to inform strategic decision-making.
CI helps product managers (PMs), product marketing managers (PMMs), and other teams like sales enablement and executives stay informed about competitor moves, emerging technologies, and market shifts.
While large enterprises usually have dedicated CI teams, in smaller companies, competitive intelligence is often fragmented and inconsistent, with data scattered across different teams and no clear ownership.
However, every company can benefit by identifying opportunities to differentiate your product, avoid costly mistakes, and uncover market gaps that your competitors haven’t filled. It allows you to pivot quickly when your competitors make strategic moves or introduce new features that could impact your position in the market.
Example:
Your product team is about to prioritize a new feature that has been highly requested internally, but before moving forward, you check on a competitor. You discover they've just launched a similar feature, but early customer feedback shows it’s confusing and hard to use.
By learning from their missteps, you can design your feature to focus on simplicity and ease of use, avoiding their mistakes and potentially gaining a competitive advantage by offering a better solution to the same problem.
Competitive intelligence doesn’t have to be a full-time job—it’s about developing a mindset of staying informed and dedicating focused time to it. Here’s how it works for product teams:
A Competitor Database is a centralized repository where companies track, monitor, and analyze key information about their competitors.
This includes data on competitor products, features, pricing, messaging, and overall market positioning. By continuously updating this information, product and marketing teams can stay informed about competitors’ moves and use the insights to guide product development and marketing strategies.
For product managers (PMs) and product marketing managers (PMMs), competitor research can often feel scattered and uncoordinated. Without a Competitor Database, teams may work in silos, conducting redundant research or—worse—not monitoring competitors at all.
A well-maintained Competitor Database ensures that everyone in the organization has access to the same insights, enabling more informed decision-making and fostering collaboration across teams. It also provides a starting point for innovation by revealing gaps in competitors’ offerings that can inspire new product features or improvements.
🔧️ How It Works in Practice
A Competitor Database involves adding competitors you want to track and setting up systems to automatically update their profiles with relevant data. This data can come from multiple sources, such as:
💡️Pro tip: A good Competitor Database doesn’t just store information—it evolves. Use it as a living resource that’s regularly updated with competitor changes, product launches, and market shifts.
Imagine a scenario where your customers have been asking for an electronic signature feature. With a Competitor Database, you can quickly check which of your competitors already offer this feature, which pricing plans it’s included in, and which customer segments they target. You might also discover if they’ve partnered with a particular technology provider, giving you a head start on your research and helping you make informed decisions about whether to prioritize this feature.
Competitor Insight refers to the actionable intelligence gathered by analyzing competitors' activities, including their product updates, website changes, marketing strategies, and even limited-release materials such as product collateral given to prospects.
Competitor Insights helps companies stay ahead by uncovering trends, spotting gaps in the market, and identifying strengths and weaknesses in competitors’ offerings.
By understanding how competitors are evolving their products and positioning, teams can:
🔧 How It Works in Practice:
There are several types of insights you can gather from competitors, each offering unique benefits:
💡️Pro tip: The most valuable insights often come from a combination of sources. Don’t rely on one channel—analyzing product updates alongside marketing strategies or customer feedback offers a more complete picture of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
The Competitive Landscape refers to the overall market environment in which your product or service operates, including all direct and indirect competitors. It encompasses the strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market positions of these competitors, as well as industry trends and customer preferences.
As a Product Manager (PM), it's easy to get engrossed in day-to-day tasks like feature development, sprint planning, and user feedback.
However, understanding the broader competitive landscape is crucial for making strategic decisions that align with market realities. It helps you anticipate shifts, identify opportunities, and position your product effectively against competitors.
💡️Pro tip: Schedule regular "strategic thinking" sessions away from daily operational duties. Use this time to review the competitive landscape, brainstorm with other teams, and adjust your product roadmap as needed.
Competitor Monitoring is the ongoing process of tracking competitors’ activities, from website updates to social media posts, email campaigns, and product launches.
This practice is less about deep analysis and more about keeping an eye on what’s happening in real time, so you can react quickly and spot trends over time.
Monitoring competitors consistently ensures that you’re not caught off-guard by their moves. It helps PMs spot emerging product trends, identify new features being rolled out, and understand where competitors are focusing their development efforts.
For PMMs, it provides real-time insight into competitor messaging, positioning, and marketing strategies, allowing you to differentiate your own product more effectively.
Competitor Monitoring involves setting up tracking systems to follow competitor activities across multiple platforms. Here’s how to start:
💡️Pro tip: Instead of sticking to rigid frameworks like SWOT, focus on agile, ongoing analysis. Competitor insights can quickly become obsolete, so make it a continuous process rather than a one-time exercise.
You notice a competitor has launched a feature your customers have been asking for a long time. Before, your users had no alternative, but now the competitor offers a solution, putting your business at risk. By spotting this quickly, you can prioritize that feature, adjust your messaging, and keep your customers from switching.
Market Research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data about a market, including information about target customers, competitors, and industry trends.
For software companies, this involves understanding user needs, market opportunities, and competitive positioning.
For Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers, Market Research is a critical tool for making informed product decisions, refining positioning, and identifying opportunities for new products and features.
It helps teams stay grounded in real-world data, rather than relying on assumptions or internal biases. In fast-moving industries like SaaS, where customer needs and market conditions can shift quickly, continuous Market Research is key to staying relevant and competitive.
Market Research typically involves two approaches:
💡️ Pro Tip: Use secondary research to inform and prioritize your primary research efforts. This ensures you're asking the right questions to the right people, making your primary research more effective.
Product Positioning is the strategic process of defining how your product fits into the market and how it should be perceived by your target customers. It involves identifying your product's unique value proposition and differentiators to create a compelling narrative that resonates with your audience.
Effective Product Positioning is crucial for both building and marketing your product.
For Product Managers (PMs), it provides clarity on what features to prioritize based on the value they deliver to customers. For Product Marketing Managers (PMMs), it guides the development of messaging and campaigns that highlight the product's strengths and appeal to the target audience.
In crowded markets, especially in B2B SaaS, clear positioning helps your product stand out. It ensures that both your team and your customers understand the unique benefits your product offers compared to competitors.
Example
You're a PM at a SaaS company offering an analytics platform in a crowded market. Competitors focus on complex, enterprise-level solutions. Through research, you discover that small to mid-sized e-commerce businesses feel overwhelmed by these complicated tools and desire straightforward insights.
You decide to position your product as the "simple yet powerful analytics tool for growing e-commerce businesses."
💡 Pro Tip: Regularly revisit and refine your product positioning. As the market evolves and customer needs change, your positioning should adapt accordingly. Use insights from competitor analysis and customer feedback to keep your positioning relevant and impactful.
A Product Roadmap is a strategic plan that outlines the vision, direction, and progress of a product over time. It serves as a guiding document that communicates the "why" and "what" behind what you're building. The roadmap aligns teams, prioritizes features, and keeps stakeholders informed about where the product is headed.
A well-crafted product roadmap is essential for several reasons:
💡️ Pro Tip Keep your roadmap customer-centric. While it's important to be aware of competitor activities, your primary focus should be on solving your customers' problems.
Sales Enablement is the process of providing sales teams with the resources, tools, and information they need to sell your product effectively. This includes training, content, and data that help sales reps engage buyers throughout the customer journey.
By empowering the sales team with the right information and tools, PMs and PMMs can ensure that the product's value proposition is clearly communicated to potential customers.
This collaboration helps in:
PMs and PMMs can conduct training sessions to educate sales reps on new features, use cases, and benefits. Share detailed product roadmaps to give sales teams insight into upcoming enhancements.
Supply sales teams with competitor analysis reports and battle cards.Highlight your product's unique selling points and how it addresses customer pain points better than alternatives.
Encourage sales reps to share insights from customer interactions, and use this feedback to refine product features and marketing messages.
SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a classic business tool used to assess both internal and external factors that can impact the success of your product.
While it may be a staple of business school, in the world of SaaS product management, SWOT offers a valuable framework for thinking strategically about your competition.
Let’s be real: SWOT is often viewed as something you do in a class project rather than a practical tool.
It can feel too broad and unfocused, especially when you're neck-deep in feature development or go-to-market strategies. But as a PM, thinking critically about what makes your competitor’s product strong and where they are vulnerable allows you to become a more strategic decision-maker.
By breaking down your competitors' strengths and weaknesses—whether it's in their features, pricing strategies, or customer service —you can identify ways to improve your product against your competition.
When conducting a SWOT against a software competitor, focus on specific, actionable insights rather than generic observations. Here's a breakdown of how to apply each part of SWOT effectively:
💡 Pro Tip: It's less about the technique, than the mindset of seeing opportunities when looking at your industry. Spot new technologies or features that could set you apart, and be the first to fill those gaps.
Win/Loss Analysis is the process of examining deals that were either won or lost, to identify key factors influencing those outcomes.
This type of analysis focuses on various elements such as product features, pricing, competitor strengths, and sales process to uncover patterns and trends that impact deal success.
Win/Loss Analysis is an incredible source of product and marketing insights. It helps you understand which features are deal-breakers, and how you can improve your product, messaging, or process to win more deals.
Typically, Win/Loss Analysis involves collecting feedback from your sales team, customers, and prospects. The goal is to understand what factors led to a successful deal or why a prospect chose a competitor instead. You'll examine:
If you notice a pattern where customers consistently choose a competitor because they offer feature X that you don’t, this insight could influence your decision to prioritize building that feature.
On the flip side, if your product wins a lot of deals because of its ease of integration, you can highlight this more in your marketing communications and sales demos.