How can product development teams address competitors who copy their products?
Is it beneficial to invest energy complaining about how Y company made a copy of Z product?
I’ve been struggling with this piece of weekend wisdom for some time.
Copyright and patent claims aside, allowing a product development team to wallow in loss due to being imitated is not helpful.
There is a reason why I like this quote. It reminds me that a copy is never quite as good as the original.
“When you feel copied, remember that people can only go where you have already been, they have no idea where you are going next.” – Liz Lange
To its credit, Apple continues to bring new products to market and evolve its product lines year upon year.
Early on, Samsung copied the iPhone as a way of displacing Apple in the mobile phone market.
Apple didn’t cry about the competition making a copy of its iconic product.
Instead, the teams continue to improve the iPhone based on customer feedback and the desire to continue to lead the market.
It’s tough for product teams to keep pace with competition.
They do get beat to the market, and those times should prompt retrospection. A commitment to becoming better at releasing on or ahead of the next new/improved product release date should be a goal.
There will always be influencing factors beyond the product team that may delay bringing a product to market. Learning from those experiences can help a team to mitigate risk or activate countermeasures when those events happen.
Becoming better at releasing product updates and launching new products can create the momentum a team needs to stay focused and ahead of the competition.
Lots to consider in this post, I hope your weekend gets off to a good start!
How about some “weekend wisdom”?
In product development, a goal is to make complicate things “appear” simple.
If you could look at all the software code moving encoded information from your computer screen to a given company, you would be amazed at how many lines of code are involved.
The same applies to almost every object being built with connectivity as a feature.
Under all the panels, covers, or shell is a thoughtfully engineered design.
However, over-design or over-simplification is a real challenge.
That’s why I share the quote below. As a gentle reminder for teams to assess how much effort they put into making things “simple”.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein
When high performing teams demonstrate teamwork skills, they freely challenge assumptions around concepts like simplicity.
Company culture has a substantial influence on how well development teams can balance competing demands.
What are some of the approach you have used to avoid making a product too simple?
Experimentation should be part of problem-solving processes.
For instance, I’ve been working to write prompts that guide hashtag#AI to compare datasets.
My hypothesis is there may be a generative AI tool available that can compare datasets that is more accurate than building a solution.
So far, I’ve experienced limits with my experiment like:
❌ Tools do not support uploading files into the interface.
❌ Copying more than X record rows into an interface truncates the dataset.
❌ AI hallucinations, where a tool creates comparisons with details that do not exist in the datasets.
I sense that I’m getting close to solving this problem with AI. 😉
Have you compared datasets using generative AI? What have your experiences been like?
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