Before you invest in competitor analysis

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Before you spend anything on competitor analysis, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Look for the gaps, not just for what to copy
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

Their weaknesses are your positioning. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Check what they rank for that you do not. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The short version

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about competitor analysis before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Their weaknesses are your positioning — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.