The Cost of Chasing Every Competitor

It’s easy to get pulled into a cycle of “keeping up,” but I’ll show you how to stay focused on building products that matter rather than scrambling to copy whatever someone else just launched.

If you let competitors dictate your roadmap, you’ll always be playing catch-up. Customers don’t buy your product because it’s a carbon copy of something else. They buy it because it solves their problem better, faster, or more meaningfully than alternatives.

Competitor awareness is important, but competitor obsession wastes time, spreads your team too thin, and erodes confidence in your product strategy. The best product managers know how to track the market without becoming consumed by it.

Most people fail because they confuse monitoring competition with mimicking competition. They see a shiny new feature on a rival platform and panic. Leadership demands to know why “we don’t have that yet.”

Suddenly, the roadmap is disrupted, priorities shift, and the team is chasing someone else’s vision. What’s missing is a clear filter for deciding what actually matters.

Not every competitor launch is relevant to your customers, and not every feature is worth building. Without discipline, you become reactive instead of strategic.

It's important to understand the market, but it's more important to understand your customer.

Let's take a more in-depth look at why "keeping up with the Joneses" is often a mistake.

Competitor Features Aren’t Customer Problems

One of the most common mistakes is assuming that because a competitor built something, your customers must want it too. That logic rarely holds up.

A feature can be popular in the market but irrelevant to your target segment.

When leadership pressures you with “our competitor just launched X,” ask a simple question: “Do our customers have this problem, and how big of a problem is it for them?” If the answer is unclear, go back to discovery.

Competitor features are only worth pursuing if they overlap with a real, validated customer pain point. Otherwise, you risk burning resources on something that looks good in a sales deck but does nothing to improve adoption, retention, or satisfaction.

Separate Signal from Noise

Not every competitor move is a signal worth acting on. Many times, companies launch flashy features for PR value or investor optics, not because customers demanded them.

If you react to every headline, you’ll misinterpret noise as urgency.

Instead, track competitors systematically. Document their launches, watch how customers respond, and measure adoption if you can.

The key question isn’t “what did they launch?” It’s “what’s sticking in the market?” If a competitor adds something and customers barely use it, that’s not a signal. If they add something and suddenly adoption spikes or churn drops, that’s worth investigating.

By treating competitor tracking as an input instead of a driver, you avoid the chaos of reacting to every move and instead focus on what actually matters.

Use Competitors to Sharpen Your Positioning

Your job isn’t just to decide what features to build. It’s also to position your product in a way that makes sense for your market. Competitors can help you do this if you frame them the right way.

For example, if a competitor launches a new workflow that looks complex and heavy, you can position your product as the lightweight, simple alternative.

If they double down on enterprise capabilities, you can lean into accessibility for small and mid-sized businesses. The point isn’t to copy them, it’s to use their moves as contrast.

Their strengths can highlight your differentiation if you’re clear about who you serve and why.

This is how you win without chasing. You don’t need to match every feature. You need to clarify why your product is the better fit for your chosen customer.

Build for Longevity, Not Parity

One of the hardest parts of product management is resisting the short-term pressure of “we need this now” in favor of building long-term value.

Competitor-chasing almost always drives parity, not advantage. You might catch up feature for feature, but you won’t stand out.

Instead, invest in the things your customers consistently tell you matter most. These are usually not the flashy add-ons, but the core workflows, reliability, and usability improvements that competitors often overlook.

In the long run, customers stick with the product that solves their daily problems better, not the one with the longest list of features on a marketing slide.

Staying disciplined here requires courage. It means telling leadership “we’re not going to match that feature right now” and showing them why focusing on your unique strengths will create more sustainable value.

Bring the Conversation Back to Outcomes

At the end of the day, features are just means to an end. Customers don’t care if you have feature parity with your competitor.

They care if your product helps them save time, reduce costs, or achieve results.

When faced with competitor pressure, always bring the conversation back to outcomes. “This feature may look impressive, but will it reduce churn? Will it increase adoption? Will it improve NPS?”

If the answer is no, it doesn’t belong on your roadmap. By framing the conversation around measurable outcomes, you turn competitor panic into a rational discussion about impact.

This mindset also helps with stakeholder management. Instead of debating features, you’re debating business results, which creates clarity and alignment across the organization.

In Conclusion

The temptation to chase competitors is strong. It feels like the safe move, the defensive play. But in reality, it’s one of the fastest ways to lose focus and dilute your product’s identity. The best product managers know how to monitor the market without being consumed by it.

They understand that competitors can inform strategy but should never dictate it.

If you want to build products that last, stop trying to keep up with everything your competitors are doing. Start doubling down on the problems your customers actually care about. That’s how you build something that outpaces the noise and earns real loyalty.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.