Amey-Thakur Competitive strategy
Better products lose to worse products with better distribution routinely. Strategy is choosing where you compete and what durable advantage you have, which is a different question from what your product does.
Method
- Define the competitive set as customers see it. Including doing nothing and the spreadsheet they use today, which is usually the real competitor.
- Identify what actually sustains an advantage. Switching costs, network effects, proprietary data, distribution, or cost position. Features are copied; these are not.
- Choose a position deliberately. Broad or focused, premium or low cost. Trying to be everything means competing everywhere with nothing durable.
- Understand the incumbent's constraints. What they cannot do without damaging their existing business is where a smaller entrant wins.
- Watch adjacent entrants, not just direct rivals. The dangerous competitor is often a company with distribution adding your feature rather than a direct clone.
- Test the strategy against a competitor's rational response. A plan that assumes competitors stand still is a plan for the first six months only (see second-order-thinking).
- Revisit as the market changes. Advantages erode, and the position that worked at launch is rarely the one that works at scale (see agent-strategy-review).
Boundaries
Strategy sets direction; execution determines the outcome, and most failures are execution rather than positioning. Competitor information must come from legitimate public sources, and coordination on price or markets is illegal in most jurisdictions. Frameworks organise thinking rather than producing answers.