The Ultimate Guide to Competitor Dashboards

The Importance of Competitor Research in B2B SaaS

As a product manager, you must learn from your competitors’ products

B2B SaaS is extremely competitive, and chances are that your product has many competitors already. This is a formidable opportunity for you as a Product Manager.

First, all those competitors are actively discovering, designing and building solutions to your users’ problems. If you can derive insights from their work, that's very close to having multiple product teams working for you. Let them try things, make mistakes, and then copy what works and learn from what doesn't.

Second, it's also likely that, while all those products solve similar problems for their users, each has a different approach: some might be serving a slightly narrower user segment or subset of their problems, and some might use different technology. That's a truly diverse and unique source of ideas you can leverage to improve your own product.

Competitors dashboards: your company's virtual war room

Everyone in your company il already doing some kind of competitor research :

• Your CEO is very interested in what other solutions you might buy or partner with to do external growth
• Your Marketing team needs to achieve a product positioning that is clear for your prospective audience
• Your Sales team needs effective battle cards to understand the key arguments to counter the competitors evaluated by their prospects

Creating a common Competitor Dashboard enables the whole company to share insights. In addition of not doing the work twice, it’s a great opportunity to have all those teams align and work together to make your company more competitive and your product better.

As you might have noticed, all that research generates data that is tremendously useful for you, the Product Manager.

So if you don't have one already, then you should go ahead and kickstart that initiative. And if you are lucky enough to have a Product Marketing team, then it might be great to have them onboard as well.

A key source of insights for Product Strategy

A very important part of growing from Junior PM to Senior PM, or getting into a product leadership position is becoming really good at product strategy.

Product Strategy is all about setting a longer-term Product Vision and Goals, then laying out the smaller milestones and achievements you’ll follow to reach them. In a red-ocean market, this means crafting a product that brings much more value to your customers than your competitors.

By looking at what they are doing, you can uncover the patterns and their longer-term trajectory. It makes you think about the Big Strategic Questions such as "What customer segments are worth pursuing ?” and “How can I differentiate and beat my competitors there ?”.

As a result, competitive research is a great way to get started on asking yourself and answering those questions. It will make answering tactical questions ("what feature to build next”) much easier for your team.

Integrating your competitor dashboard into your product process

Competitor research is not something that you can do once and be done with. As your competitive landscape is ever-changing, you will derive the most value from a continuously improving approach.

The main artifact is your Competitor Dashboard, it's meant to be regularly updated, and acts as a fill-in-the-blanks template that makes you think of the right questions and helps you structure information.

The whole process is meant to take around 1 to 2 hours :

• Research updated information on your competitors
• Consolidate your findings into your Competitor Dashboard
• Enrich your insights and discuss them with other teams
• Take decisions to adjust your roadmap and strategy accordingly

Zoom

Competitor Dashboard - Research and Update Process

You will want to repeat this every month, maybe more often if you are in a rapidly-evolving field

Best Practices for Using Your Competitor Dashboard

Start Small and Improve

Building your dashboard should not be a daunting activity.

• Quality and consistency are much preferable to quantity: start with a few critical metrics and information according to your team's needs and expand over time.

Balance Depth and Breadth

When building your dashboard, it's tempting to add every competitor you find. Unless you have a whole team dedicated to competitor research, it's going to be too much to maintain.

Instead, remember the "80/20 rule":

• Deep-dive on your 1-3 main competitors: Focus your efforts on the ones that are the biggest threat to your business.
• Keep an eye on the indirect ones: Don't ignore smaller players or adjacent markets. Disruptive innovations often come from unexpected places.

Establish a Regular Review Cadence

• Set a consistent schedule: Dedicate time each month to update and review your dashboard. This ensures you're always working with current data.
• Create a ritual: Make this review a part of your team's routine. Consider scheduling it before strategy meetings to inform discussions.

Leverage Technology Effectively

• Automate data collection: Use tools like web scrapers, social media monitors, and news aggregators to streamline information gathering.
• Visualize data: Employ charts, graphs, and heat maps to make trends and comparisons more apparent.
• Consider all-in-one platforms: Integrated platforms like PeerPanda effectively connect all your data sources and use AI to surface insights.

Integrate with Customer Feedback

• Cross-reference with user research: Compare competitor features with your users' needs to identify true opportunities.
• Monitor customer sentiment: Track how users perceive your competitors' moves through social media, reviews, and direct feedback.

Prepare for Different Scenarios

• Conduct "what-if" analyses: Regularly brainstorm potential competitor moves and plan your responses.
• Develop contingency plans: Have strategies ready for major competitive events (e.g., a competitor being acquired or launching a groundbreaking feature).
• Stay agile: Build flexibility into your roadmap to quickly respond to significant market changes.

Continuously Improve Your Process

• Regularly refine your dashboard: Assess which metrics and information sources are providing the most value. Ditch the useless ones.
• Seek feedback: Ask your team and stakeholders how the competitor insights are influencing their work.
• Conduct retrospectives on your reactions to competitor moves and the decisions you've taken. For example, when that competitor launched their new analytics dashboard 3 months ago, we decided not to build our own. What made us take this decision? Was it a good one?

Make it a Team Activity

CPOs and Heads of Product: Competitive research is a great way to onboard new team members and train junior product managers.

Yes, having the intern do competitor research is too much of a cliché, but that's because everyone has been doing it wrong. Indeed, exhaustively listing the competitors and burying the work deep in an obsolete Confluence page serves no one.

Instead, take some time to review the findings with them. Ask them:

• What are the differences in positioning between those competitors?
• What customer segments might prefer this competing product over our solution?
• Do we think that this competing AI feature is delivering real value to customers? Or are they doing AI for the sake of it?

Don't Be Too Paranoid: Focus on Your Own Vision

When looking at competitors, it's easy to worry too much about the gaps in your own product. Remember that you should not react to every competitor's move: it's perfectly fine to wait to see the market's reaction before making significant changes to your roadmap.