How do you see competition?

Do you respect your competition? Not that it matters to them, but if you are worried about competition, you may want to change your attitude to one of "respectfully curious." Why? Because competitors can be your best friends -- if you are in the product development chain.

Competitors are looking at the same market data, trade magazines, professional society publications, and employment data that you are. And they hear the same rumors and tales of new products and ideas. How does that help you? By having a close look at what their strategy is (which you have to impute from seeing their products and announcements), you get a feel for how they interpret that data. Then you can look at your own interpretations and find the differences. What opportunities do you see that they don't? How is your business model -- or user interaction model -- different from theirs?

Having found differences -- or made them up on the fly -- you can charge onward with your product strategy, with a little more confidence that your viewpoint is distinct from the competitors' view.

What are key things to look for? Try these: frequency of product introductions; pricing, individual and quantity; free trials? service and support? characterization of the user or buyer of the product or service; objective for the product -- how do they think the user/buyer will benefit from the product?

No two companies see markets and users in the same way. Cherish your own distinctness and develop it further by looking at the competition -- with respect and curiosity, but not with envy.

Marketing takes over Engineering

What happens when Marketing takes over the Engineering function? One of my current clients has a very strong VP/founder who knows a lot about engineering things.

As a startup, the company successfully introduced novel products because everyone worked on everything -- the usual startup mode for a technology company. As products are turned (they are on their 8th product now), Engineering needs to get some predictability to its schedules and commitments. But Marketing continues to drive a lot of the Engineering operation simply by paying more attention to the detail than the Engineering VP does.

The situation doesn't look bad from a technology point of view -- there are good decisions made, even if they continue to be made (product features added) throughout the development cycle. But the recently hired senior managers in Engineering are going crazy, because they have two masters -- the Engineering VP and the Marketing VP. Which one should they listen to?

My advice to them for now is to get their operations in order -- write functional specs (or at least a prioritized list of features), meet schedules by biting off incremental pieces of the implementation at a time, report on exactly when changes were made to the requirements and how long it took to accomodate the change. Then press the two VPs to settle the issue of how Engineering is to be managed. It can't be settled by the next level of management, so long as it is unsettled at the top.