Main takeaways: -Gain customer insights by studying your competition. -Most effective sources of information about your competitors' products. -Best practices for using your competitors' products to learn about your customers.

1. Gaining Customer Insights Through
Competition by Lime Principal PM
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6. Gaining Customer Insights
Through The Competition
William K. Lee

7. Speaker
William K. Lee

8. About me
Current: Principal Product Manager @ Lime
Past: PM @ Strava and OpenGov, Engineer at Fandom and others
Outside of work: long distance running and trivia (“7 and 7”)

9. Agenda
1. Why you should care about the competition
2. When to gain customer insights through the competition
3. How to learn about your customers through the competition

10. Obsess over customers, not competition ... right?

11. Worrying about competition + having the wrong goal = failure

12. Leverage competition to learn about your customers quickly
● You have competitors that are ahead of you
● Save time in customer development by leveraging them

13. Three scenarios for using competition to gain customer insights
1. Entering an established market
2. Lean user research team
3. Difficult to talk to your own customers

14. Three ways to gain customer insights through the competition
1. Use the competitor product yourself
2. Interview customers of the competitor product
3. Read reviews on the Internet: app stores, Reddit, YouTube

15. Example: Taking Lime Juicer app from zero to one
● My first product at Lime: app for independent
contractors to charge scooters (Lime Juicers)
● Another company had two-month head start
● I took all three steps to learn about their product
○ Signed up to be a charger in the other app
○ Talked to other customers
○ Read internet posts

16. ● Documented user journey with visuals
Step 1: Created teardown of competitor user experience

17. ● Synthesized my own experiences and other customers’
Step 2: Analyzed strengths and weaknesses
“Find” map was hard
to parse
“Releasing” was time consuming due to poor UX, GPS drift + low tolerance for
error

18. ● Acknowledged other app’s successes
and replicate them in Juicer app
● Identified major pain points and turned
them into delightful moments for
Juicers
● Results:
○ Gained tens of thousands of Lime Juicers
within two months of launch
○ Neutralized the other company’s head start
Step 3: Replicated strengths and capitalized on weaknesses
Used QR code to
speed up core task
Earning money and getting payouts were
magic moments

19. Example: Mining app store reviews
● Use script to pull reviews of other apps in all languages
● Scan data to find trends
● This practice complements lean user research team

20. Reviews from new market for Lime generated actionable insight
● Another company launched scooters in UK months before Lime
● UK authorities require scanning driver license before first ride
● App store reviews uncovered insight into local user behavior: they leave driver
license at home
● Other app only asks for DL while starting first ride

21. Turned competitor pain point into delightful moment
● Lime app makes it easy to scan DL
while at home

22. Summary
1. Leveraging your competition speeds up the customer development cycle
2. Do this when you’re entering an established market, you have a lean user research
team or it’s difficult to talk to your own customers
3. Gain customer insights by using the competitor product yourself, talking to other
customers and reading Internet reviews

23. Thank you!
linkedin.com/in/billklee
Twitter: @buzzsaw

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