Prioritizing features based on competitive importance

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The competitor column helps you consider the extent to which building a certain feature would hgelp you compete with a specific competitor.

While we wouldn't recommend blindly feature-matching your competitors, considering how well their solutions meet the needs of prospective users (in relation to your own) can be a helpful way to ensure your product excels in the marketplace.

In this article:

Relevant to Legacy boards only

Enabling competitor columns

Competitor columns can be enabled in workspace settings by an administrator. If you don't have this toggle enabled, you won't be able to add competitor columns to your boards. 

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Creating and displaying competitor columns

Once enabled, competitor columns can be displayed on any features board. Click the AddColumnButton.svg Add columns button and select Competitors to display the Competitors sidebar.

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Click Create competitor at the bottom of the sidebar to add a new field. Toggle the slider beside a competitor to add it to your board as a column. 

Using competitor columns

With competitor columns on your board, click an intersecting row to edit the competitor field for that feature. The bigger the square, the higher more important that feature is for beating that competitor. 

When scoring each feature along a competitor column, you may need to consider a few different factors:

  • How important is the need that this feature addresses? If your target users don't have a need for it, it doesn't matter if competitor X has it—it won't effectively help you compete with them.
  • How marketable is the feature? In your industry, is this feature considered table-stakes? Do prospects come to you demanding it? Are analysts in your industry saying it's must-have functionality?
  • How well does the competitor address that need today relative to your product? If the competitor doesn't have this functionality, mark a feature very important if beating them to market would give you a strong advantage. If the competitor does have this functionality, rate a feature very important if reaching feature parity is critical for remaining competitive.

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