On reactive roadmaps and the cost of copying
The email arrives on a Tuesday morning. A competitor has just announced a new feature. Someone forwards it to the group chat. Within the hour, someone asks: “are we building this?”
And just like that, someone else’s product decision becomes yours.
This happens in every company, in every industry, at every stage. The competitor moves, the pressure builds, and the conversation starts before anyone has asked the only question that actually matters: should we?
The instinct to copy is not irrational. If a competitor has built something and customers are using it, there’s signal in that. Ignoring it entirely is its own kind of arrogance. The market is telling you something. You should probably listen.
But there’s a difference between listening and reacting. And most product teams, under pressure, react.
So the feature gets added to the roadmap just because the competitor has it. Forget whether it fits the product strategy or whether your customers have been asking for it. No one in the meeting had the guts to say they didn’t know if it was the right call.
What does it take to be that person? A few things that sound simple and aren’t. Know your customer well enough to speak for them without a survey in your hand. Know your product well enough to say what belongs in it and what doesn’t. And have a strategy clear enough to point at when the pressure builds, because “we’re not building that because it doesn’t fit our strategy” is a complete sentence, but only if the strategy actually exists.
That discomfort is the real decision. And it always goes the wrong way if nobody did the preparation that would have made it easy.
This isn’t a new problem. The discipline of saying no to feature requests, regardless of where they come from, is something worth revisiting. I wrote about it in a previous post.
Here’s what copying actually costs, beyond the engineering hours.
Every feature you build because a competitor has it is a feature you didn’t build because your customer needed it. The roadmap has a fixed capacity. A reactive addition is always at the expense of something else, something that was already there for a reason.
And then there’s the positioning cost. The more features you copy, the more your product looks like theirs. Over time, the differences that made you interesting to a specific customer start to blur. You didn’t lose ground by being worse. You lost ground by becoming identical.
The safest-feeling product decision, ship what the competitor shipped, turns
out to be the riskiest one of all. May be not immediately or visibly. But compounded over two or three years of reactive roadmaps, you end up with a product that stands for nothing in particular and appeals to no one specifically.
So how do you decide what’s worth copying and what’s worth ignoring?
A product strategy solid enough to defend a no is built on three things.
Who it’s for, specifically enough that you can say with confidence “this serves our customer” or “it doesn’t.” Vague customer definitions make every feature arguable. Sharp ones make most decisions obvious. And they make the Tuesday morning conversation a lot shorter.
What problem it exists to solve, not the full range of problems it could theoretically address, but the one central problem it solves better than anything else. If you’re not sure what that is, every competitor feature will feel relevant, because relevance is easy to argue when the target is undefined.
What you’ve decided not to do. This is the hardest one. A strategy without explicit exclusions isn’t a strategy, it’s a wish list. The features you’ve consciously chosen not to build are as important as the ones you have. They’re what keeps the product coherent over time and your positioning intact.
All three tend to get skipped. The customer becomes everyone. The problem becomes everything. The exclusions become a conversation for the day that never comes.
So, the product decision nobody wants to make is definetly not the one that says yes to every competitor’s new feature.
It’s the one that says no, clearly, calmly, with evidence, while the pressure is building and everyone in the room is waiting for someone to just agree to build the thing.
That decision requires a product strategy clear enough to defend. When it doesn’t exist, the roadmap fills itself, with everything the competition has already shipped.
Further Reading
- April Dunford — Obviously Awesome
- Clayton Christensen — Competing Against Luck
- Roger Martin & A.G. Lafley — Playing to Win
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