Competition benchmarking is a highly abused term in product management. All product managers do it whenever they are adding new features to an existing product, or creating a product from scratch.
The Internet is filled with many such frameworks, excel sheets, etc. You can use any framework to start with, But here I am going to talk about three pitfalls to look for while doing competitor benchmarking.
1: Your competitor might be doing A/B testing
While benchmarking your product features against any competitor always keep in mind that competitor is also evolving their features by doing A/B testing and you may get confused by their feature variations. The best way is to avoid cosmetic features like the position of a button, the color of CTA, etc. because all these things are optimized for each product post-launch in an iterative process once core features are benchmarked.
2: Old design does not mean a non-functional design.
Amazon is having a similar UI design for check out the page for last so many years they are not moving their design elements at all they amusingly have two CTA buttons on the payment page but they are not bothered by it because their customers are used to this design and changing it would cause huge drop off on check out page. Moreover, why fix something if it is not broken? so while benchmarking keep factors like the user learning curve in mind.
3: Good-looking design may not be generating good business.
Design is tightly dependent on business objectives and all other aspects of a business. news in short (a news app), is having a very trendy and up-north design while Indian express (Another news app) is having traditional old long scroll because both have different product positioning. News in short is to get news in 60 words while scrolling mobile, commuting, or waiting in line. while Indian express is all about an in-depth analysis of news and events of the day.
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