Stop Copying Features: A PM’s Guide to Competitor Product Analysis

Turn competitor product analysis into insights, not copy-paste.

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Have you ever looked at your roadmap and thought: “Half of these ideas are here just because our competitors already did them”?

It’s a common story. A stakeholder drops a screenshot of someone else’s product, someone in Slack says “hey, they have this feature,” and suddenly there’s a new task in your backlog.

And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. Watching competitors is normal — users will compare you to them anyway. The real question isn’t “to copy or not to copy” — it’s how to analyze competitors’ products so you can turn their solutions into your own insights.

In my previous article on Product Discovery, I wrote that ideas come from many sources: research, customers, data… and, of course, competitors. But the real challenge is this: how do you turn someone else’s features into your own hypotheses? That’s what this article is about.