One of the foundational skills for product managers — one of the three core roles in the internet industry — is called “competitive analysis.” The idea is straightforward: study your competitors, track how their products evolve and change, and extract general industry patterns and lessons to learn from their strengths while compensating for your own weaknesses.
To me, this is a textbook example of work where form trumps value.
The product managers who write competitive analyses tend to cluster in the junior-to-mid range. Senior PMs, interestingly, rarely bother — probably because they’ve figured out it’s not particularly useful.
Junior and mid-level PMs are working with information pulled entirely from public sources, which is inherently incomplete. If you have industry experience, you can at least apply your own judgment to assess what’s actually true. But newcomers or PMs without much domain background are left copying release notes and trying to force some conclusion through sheer subjective reasoning.
The whole exercise ends up feeling like a mandatory essay prompt — pure formalism.
Consider these questions:
If a feature exists across every competitor’s product, does that mean the feature has genuine value?
If a competitor launches a major update packed with new features, should we follow suit and ship something similar?
If a competitor released Feature A two months ago and then quietly pulled it, can we conclude Feature A was worthless?
These are questions that competitive analysis simply cannot answer.
But here’s the thing: if you work in tech and publicly declare that the standard approach to competitive analysis is useless — that you won’t be doing it — your colleagues and managers will probably assume something is wrong with you.
When something becomes established consensus, challenging it makes you look like the problem.
So does competitive analysis have any real value? Yes — but only as cross-validation. It’s a mine detector, not a product improvement tool. You cannot use competitive analysis to prove that a decision you’ve already made is the right one. And you cannot hide intellectual laziness behind “they have it, so we need it too.”
Of course, in today’s fiercely competitive landscape, most products have converged to the point where their features and underlying logic are barely distinguishable. If you’re designing a product and you copy a competitor’s approach wholesale, that’s not exactly a crime.
But I still believe: when you do something, you should understand where its value actually lies. You can absolutely take the easy route to satisfy your boss or hit your KPI — but remember, your time is a fixed cost. In any given unit of time, ask yourself: are you growing enough?
Competitive analysis is just one example. Our work is full of tasks done purely to manage other people’s expectations.
What does it mean to do the right thing?
Maintaining independent judgment in the face of consensus is genuinely difficult. Your independent view might be immature or flat-out wrong — but in my view, keeping the habit of independent thinking, even through constant trial and error, beats blindly following the crowd.