Claims of market leadership are usually spurious, so those claims provide no advantage. Everyone in a market knows who the market leader is without the market leader saying anything at all.

The fast follower eats your premium. A point of difference eventually becomes a point of contention. The features that get copied occur at the interface, or on the skin. You can still compete at the model, metamodel, and sidebands. The fast follower may not see that stuff, and even if they see it, they still may not be able to copy it. Use IP protections for things behind the skin.

In “Hype Cycle,” the authors make a distinction between adoption and adaptation. Typical segmentation and requirements elicitation processes give rise to adaptation, as a means of mitigating a lack of fitness between the user and the application, particularly in the sense of meaning. IT is essentially information, rather than meaning. If you play for meaning, y0ur competitor will play for information simply because their market is not yours, so fitness would be at variance. Compete on meaning.

You are talking about the technology layer. That says nothing about the product itself.

If the product productizes the technology, then sure, I can very easily see building it on OEM technology. Eventually, I’d replace the technology platform minimally using an adaptor pattern to move across multiple OEMs.

An advantage of building on the OEM’s platform, is that the OEM is a marketing channel. Most third-party vendors sponsor marketing support programs where you can reach their install base. And, these OEMs evangelize and keep their third-party complementing developers up to date.

That said, I wouldn’t be a complementor. That business is too expensive and not leveraged enough.

If your technology is the product, then you are in a different situation, and no, I’d develop my own IP, but I would also ask if entering after market leadership has been determined is worth the investment.

I would like to suggest one more point to it. Product Manager himself should be convinced with the idea and value that his product going to bring into the market for the users.

If your Product is not solving problem better than other competitive products, you should never launch it in the market.

Make your product up to the mark and that too not very late and do promote it as much as you can. Your customer service should very good at the same time….

Hope I have not added any redundancy to the thread……

Best of Luck

Go for it, but I’ll go and create a new category once I get near the late market.

Mom & Pop shops do just fine. As do lifestyle companies. Of course, you have to be the founders. If you want to build a product management career, do what you have to, but winning big is the fast track.

If you compete on price, you just hasten the day when the category dries up and blows away, so you are down to 3P’s. If you get sold in a box or a download, then that’s one place, the early market place. If you get sold as a SaaS offering, that’s the other place. If you get sold in the big box, beware of rebate fraud. If you sell global, use a distributor, so now we’re down to 2P’s. If you compete on promo, you might as well be a complementor. You can actually succeed better as a complement than as a prime vendor with your promo spend. Down to 1P. And, being product managers, we are forced to compete on product period.

I’ll compete on other things as well as product, but the typical marketing approach is expensive and doesn’t pay as much as category creation and market leadership.

I think it is also imprtant to understand what makes the product offering differentiated or undifferentiated. I don’t think it is just the speed to market and the product being unique in terms of features that differentiates the product. In my view, it should be a combination of well defined 4P’s – Product, Price, Place and Promotion (and 7P’s in case of services) that should be used to deliver the value to the customer, better than the competitors offering.

These parameters will inturn depend on the Market and Product strategy of the companies

In stock car racing this is called “slip streaming” – you let someone else lead and punch a hole in a new environment and then you follow closely behind.

In the end I think that this is really a company call: what’s you reason for being in business? If you are a short term buy-out seeking firm that just needs lots of revenue now and low costs, then YES a me-too product is the way to go.

If you are in the game for the long haul, then Jeff is spot on.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental PM Blog
“Learn How Product Managers Can Be Successful And Get The Respect That They Deserve”

Geeks see features and might do that. But, a person ,who isn’t a computer person, has real work to do and is focused on that. They are not focused on playing with a new feature.

Forget trying to cross sell based on features. Features are addressed to your users and your users alone. If your users could explore other platforms, then what is the point of being in the market in the first place. If you have to eat, you better hope that some market barrier exists.

SaaS is an end of life position for functionality. It’s unfortunate that it has come to be seen as a beginning. It is viable, because costs have been cut to the bone. And, ideally, it wouldn’t have market barriers, but use is accumulation. That and learning becomes a market barrier even if the data moves freely from one application to another without impediment. Data movement barrers are bad business in the SaaS world.

A lot of programmers like open software, but dislike money. They work on open software, but only after some day job somewhere pays them. SaaS has to pay, and it won’t pay much, and products without some kind of exit barrier won’t pay much either.

As product managers we obviously have to strike a balance between time to market and product features/quality. With leadership and intuition we can have a positive influence in both areas. -Michael

But I believe that the time difference between a feature used as a differentiation becoming a hygiene is very short these days.

The point you make when you said “your competitors definately serve a different population………… redefining your own customers”, may be true when users can use only one of the products . But in case of web application, where the same user can be using multiple products, this may not hold true. Because it that was the case, IE would have never come up with tabbed browsing or Orkut with apps.