Losing to an Army of Competitors

A number of companies focus on competitor research. But how do you tackle competitor research when you find yourself losing to a constellation or a complete ecosystem of products, all working in harmony, rather than a single point solution?

The first step is to look at it from the perspective of the market – i.e. your customers and their customers.

In short, how do these customers typically address the job your product was designed to solve?

One way to get line of sight on their decision making is to looking at job posting trends.

For example the following graphic shows how frequently various developer focused technologies (open source projects, commercial products, programming languages, etc.) appear together in the same job posting. You can see clearly, for example, that Java and Subversion show up together in job postings all the time. If we marry this with additional knowledge about the capabilities of each solution in specific, their weaknesses when used in tandem, and the overall cost to the customer to use two or three solutions as part of an integrated stack, we can begin to see the competition for what it really is – an army of more than one.

Lastly, the graphic is also a good example of how a product like Tableau can take data visualizations to a whole new level when producing research output.