Positioning: Biggest Competitor

What is the product's biggest competitor?

This question is the fifth of several questions I've enumerated that a product manager should answer to most effectively position a product.

When determining your product's biggest competitor, think broadly. Even the very first search engine on the web had a competitor: the manual process of surfers browsing and linking to what interested them. Your product's biggest competitor may not be immediately obvious, but it exists.

Identifying your product's competitors helps you determine how you can differentiate your product from them. It also helps you determine the potential size of the market for your product.

The next entry in this series will describe how to position your your product against its biggest competitor.

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