Competitive Intelligence for Design Teams 🚀

How to create better products by looking at the competition.

Competitive intelligence might evoke different connotations for you. While it’s been around since the 1970s, it’s not what it used to be and might be the next big opportunity for product design teams.

Produced by Dave Huber

What is it?

Competitive intelligence is the practice of observing, documenting, and analyzing offerings that provide similar value to the same market. Simply put: it’s looking at what your competition does and getting better because of it. For design teams, it’s the same intent, but a different process and outcome.

Why is this important?

Software is eating the world, and creating exceptional user experiences continues to be a trillion-dollar industry. To make products that win in the market, you have to be looking not just at what the competition is doing, but how they’re delivering it through their user experience. However, evaluating and analyzing a competitor’s user experience is not a prevalent practice for design teams or competitive intelligence teams, leaving a big gap in most organizations.

Training Design Teams

We recently hosted a global Design Jam across IBM’s Cloud, Data and AI portfolio to give teams a chance to learn and apply this methodology to their work. It went really well with 50% of managers saying the results were extremely useful for their strategic planning.

If you’re already doing design thinking activities as a group, this can be incredibly easy to adopt. If you’re an IBMer, we have a great website with tools and examples you can access here (VPN only). Otherwise, here’s a sample activity of how design teams can do competitive intelligence:

Figure 1. Designed by Dave Huber

How to do competitive intelligence as a design team

1. Audit your product
   What part of the experience are you going to improve? Are you improving the signup experience? A key new feature? Focus is key, don’t try to boil the ocean, scope it down to something specific. This can be based on your current team’s sprint or a quick group audit of strengths and weaknesses throughout the user experience.
2. Identify your direct and indirect competition
   You should already know your direct competition. If not, google your product and see who else comes up, or use G2 or Trust Radius to see reviews and compare products within a category.
   Indirect competitors can be a treasure trove of insights for leap-frogging your direct competition. Try the Baymard Institute for UX benchmarks in other markets or have your team look at best-in-class examples in other industries.
3. Audit the competition
   What’s working, what’s not? It helps to get visual here; document screens with photos or videos and clearly call out strengths and weaknesses for both direct and indirect competitors.
4. Prioritize strengths + weaknesses
   Take the strengths and weaknesses identified in the previous step and sort them on a spectrum from best strengths to worst weaknesses (see step 3.3 in figure 1 above). This is a healthy stage for discussion. If necessary, using voting dots to expedite this process.
5. Turn findings into insights
   Don’t copy design ideas, make them better! Sometimes it only requires a small change, other times it might inspire an entirely (and potentially patentable) idea! This is a generative exercise so defer judgment and go for quantity over quality.
6. Turn insights into action!
   This critical last step is left out far too often from group activities. Make sure your team assigns the appropriate next steps to individuals. Whether you’re part of a small nimble team with product autonomy or part of a larger team that needs to play things back before implementation — document and assign next steps.

Why design teams should incorporate competitive intelligence:

1. It saves time
   Don’t recreate the wheel. Designers (myself included) are notorious for wanting to start from scratch. But this is a waste of time. If you’re tasked with redesigning a signup flow, do your homework. Yes, this might require an extra day or two of work, but this is about slowing down in order to speed up.
2. It improves outcomes
   When teams benchmark the competition, they deliver better outcomes. They cast a wider net and consider what’s working and what’s not — learning from both direct and indirect competitors.
3. Design adds a missing perspective
   Most competitive intelligence reports tell you what the competition is doing, but what about how they’re delivering on it through their user experience? How are they communicating to their customers and delivering on their value proposition? How are they onboarding new customers? Designers are uniquely positioned to audit these qualitative experiences.
4. It’s necessary for our highly competitive markets
   It’s human nature to look around our environment, see what’s working, what’s not, and adjust accordingly. This is how we’ve learned to survive and if offerings (products and/or services) want to survive in the market, design teams must incorporate this foundational practice of looking around their environment and getting better because of it.
5. It’s surprisingly human-centered
   Design thinking has always been about recognizing the larger context our users operate in so that we can more accurately understand their world and jobs-to-be-done. When we neglect to understand how our offerings fit within our customers’ market landscape, we risk becoming irrelevant, outdated, or even frustrating for them.

Finally, remember to do it legally and ethically

It’s important to note that competitive intelligence should not turn into corporate espionage. The good news is: staying compliant is relatively easy and straightforward:

• Don’t copy or reverse engineer specific elements (implementations, designs, interfaces). This can be illegal and it’s better to build on something to make it better anyways. See more guidance from IBM.
• Represent yourself honestly: make sure to use your real name and company email (not your personal email) when signing up for a competitor's product. Learn more.
• Respect the terms of service. For example, some might restrict what kinds of benchmarks or other analysis uses can do, who can do them, or what they’re allowed to do with the results.
• Follow your employer or organization’s guidance. If you’re not sure, ask. (Guidance for IBM employees.)

Designing @IBM Design

If you’re interested in advancing your craft as a designer, check out the open positions at IBM. We have thousands of designers doing their best work on really interesting projects and challenges.

Thanks to Andrea Barbuto and David Quinn for their legal review of this article. 🙏

Dave Huber is a Design Practices Lead at IBM based in Austin, TX. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.