Building the Flywheel: Creating Sustainable Revenue & Profit Growth

I was reflecting on my conversation with Hans Hanspal a few weeks ago (see the full interview here) and kept thinking about a part of the conversation about following the competition. I love the point Hans made about staying focused on the customer who’s job you are changing rather than just following your competition.

Here is that part of the conversation:

Early in my career the business leader I was working for saw a press release from one of our competitors announcing a new dashboard. This leader got obsessed with the press release and completely redirected our product roadmap to build that same dashboard. The customer engagement I had been doing told me that the customers didn’t want another dashboard, but really needed some improved analytics and preferred to build their own dashboards. Unfortunately I was early in my career and wasn’t effective enough to change that leader’s mind.

We ended up losing 6 months of development building a new dashboard that was ultimately a flop in the market before pivoting back to the improved analytics capabilities. Fortunately our competitor was even more stubborn and kept at their strategy for another year after our pivot, by which time we had flipped much of their customer base and increased our market share significantly.

In this instance we were able to realize that following the competition was a foolish strategy before it was too late, but I often regret those wasted 6 months. It was a strong lesson for me in being able to better articulate the customer jobs to be done and how it informs the product roadmap. I still pay attention to what our competitors are doing, but mostly in terms of how it relates to customer jobs to be done rather than simply reacting and trying to simply do what they are doing but “a little bit better”.

Strategies for Accelerating Revenue Growth and Profitability 💡 - Watch Video

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