While we do pay some attention to our competitors on Twitter, blogs, and other online sources, we focus on building a product that our customers want to use, rather than keeping up with the competition. This philosophy is kept by a number of business people I know, including Jason Fried of 37 Signals, and Mike McDerment of Freshbooks.
What do you think? Do you try to keep up with your competitors, or simply keep track of them?
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I agree with you. “Keeping up with the Jones'” is almost always a bad idea I think, whether that's in your personal or professional life.
I hate it when people choose to describe their products as “Delicious mixed with some Facebook and a dash of Twitter.” These companies often don't have a strong identity and so feel like they need to be described in terms of the competition. That's a bad thing. It's like dipping into the same gene pool – they're just tweaking the software that's already out there, rather than really injecting their own ideas and originality. (I deliberately avoided the use of the words “creative” and “innovative” in this sentence as they are now so overused they've lost their meaning.)
I think the problem is vision. It's easy to only pay a little attention to competitors if you know exactly the kind of product you want to build. But if you don't have that kind of focus on an idea, the easy option is to just look at what others are doing and copy it.
I do think taking inspiration from the competition is a good thing, but doing a straight comparison of features is misleading and unhelpful. To compare software on features alone is to miss one of the biggest strengths of great software: the experience.
Thanks for a thought provoking piece.
Much better to focus on what your customers are going to need tomorrow as opposed to focussing on what your competitors thought about a few years ago and are just releasing now.
Thanks for the video. The reasoning is sound and definitely an interesting way to approach competition. The feature list, however, would be really useful tool for me as well as your customers because it is probably the best way to get a view of the scrum'd's capabilities.
The videos as stated are a little bit outdated and probably don't showcase the fullness of what scrum'd is today.
Lastly, and this may already exist, it would be good to get an idea of the roadmap that the system is following. Is it possible for me to retrieve something like this from the “Get Satisfaction” tool?
Thanks again to your thoughtful response to my request.
Rodney (rwoodruf)
I hear you Rodney. We're going to be moving the “marketing” pages of Scrum'd over to a CMS and will include a feature list when we do that. Right now it's in the backlog, however, bugs that people are finding and a few that we found in QA are being worked on, so we'll get that up as soon as we can. As for a roadmap, we did that in the past, however as progress slowed down we stopped.
Many companies do not publish their roadmap so that competitors don't know what they are up to. What do you think about that? I'd love your input and thoughts. Thanks.