Glossary
By the Glue Team
Competitive gap analysis is the process of comparing your product's features, capabilities, and positioning against competitors to identify where you lag behind, lead ahead, or are equivalent. Gap analysis informs product strategy by revealing market opportunities, feature prioritization, and competitive positioning decisions.
Competitive gap analysis examines the "gap" between your offering and competitors in multiple dimensions:
Gap analysis is comparative—it's not about absolute quality but about relative position. You might have a feature that's technically superior to competitors but isn't obvious to customers. That's a positioning gap, not a capability gap.
Gap analysis drives strategic decisions:
Prioritization: Resources are limited. Gap analysis helps answer "What should we build next?" If a competitor has a feature users consistently ask for, building it might be worth prioritizing. If a feature is unique to competitors, understanding why (is it hard? low demand?) informs decisions.
Resource Allocation: Building me-too features isn't always valuable. If ten competitors have a feature but you don't, maybe users expect it and you should build it. If you're one of two with a feature, maybe it's defensible differentiation worth protecting.
Go-to-Market Strategy: Gaps inform messaging. If you have capabilities competitors lack, emphasize them. If you have major gaps, either work on them or position around what you do well.
Investor Relations: Investors want to know competitive positioning. Clear gap analysis shows you understand your market and have a credible plan.
Hiring Strategy: If gaps exist in technology, maybe you need to hire different skills. If gaps are in execution (you have features but they don't work well), maybe it's organizational.
M&A Decisions: Acquisitions sometimes close gaps. If a competitor acquired a capability, gap analysis shows whether it's a threat and how to respond.
Obvious Gaps: The competitor has a feature you can see in the product. You don't have it. This is easy to identify from product inspection.
Hidden Capability Gaps: Competitors have capabilities users don't see. You might not realize they exist until you understand the codebase. For example, a competitor might support payments in 50 currencies while the UI only shows 10. You don't notice until you look deeper.
Performance Gaps: Your feature takes 5 seconds; theirs takes 500ms. Users notice this as quality difference.
Positioning Gaps: You have the feature but don't emphasize it. They have it and make it a selling point.
Integration Gaps: They integrate with tools you don't. They support APIs you haven't built.
Scale Gaps: They handle 10M users per second; you handle 100K. Not relevant unless scale matters to your market.
Gap analysis methods vary in depth and cost:
Product Inspection: Use competitors' products. Sign up, explore, document features. Free but surface-level. You see what's visible, not what's hidden in the code.
User Research: Ask customers what competitors offer that you don't. What do they use competitors for? This reveals which gaps matter. What gaps don't affect customer choice?
Engineer Review: Have engineers evaluate competitor products. They'll spot technical gaps you might miss (performance, reliability, architecture).
Code Analysis: For open-source competitors, analyze code to understand capabilities. This reveals hidden functionality and architecture decisions. Glue makes comparative codebase analysis possible—understand competitor architecture and feature implementation in detail.
Analyst Reports: Industry analysts often publish gap analyses. Use them as starting points but verify independently.
Sales/Support Input: Your sales and support teams hear directly from customers why they chose competitors or what they want. This qualitative feedback is invaluable.
Once you understand gaps, you have options:
Build: Close the gap by building the missing capability. This makes sense if the gap blocks sales, is technically feasible, and is customer-requested.
Partner: Partner with another company rather than building. Stripe + payment processing is an example. Some gaps are better closed through partnership than building.
Position Around It: Emphasize strengths instead. "We're simpler and faster because we don't have that feature." Simplicity can be a selling point.
Ignore: Some gaps don't matter. If 0.1% of prospects ask about a feature, it might not be worth building.
Acquire: Buy a company to close the gap. Expensive but sometimes the fastest path.
Innovate: Instead of matching competitors' features, leapfrog with something better. This takes more time but creates differentiation.
"We should match every competitor feature." False. Unlimited resources exist nowhere. Focus on gaps that matter to your strategy and customers. Some gaps are fine to have.
"Gaps mean we're losing." False. Gaps can mean you're focused. "We don't have that because we're focused on X instead" is a legitimate positioning.
"Feature parity means we win." False. Matching features doesn't guarantee wins. Execution, pricing, marketing, and positioning matter too. Two products with identical features have different market outcomes based on these factors.
"Gap analysis is about features only." False. Brand, pricing, distribution, customer service, integration ecosystem—all have gaps. Feature gaps are just one dimension.
Competitive Battlecard: A sales tool that summarizes competitive positioning. Gap analysis is input to battlecards.
Feature Inventory: Understanding your own feature set is prerequisite to gap analysis. You can't find gaps if you don't know what you have.
Product Strategy: Gap analysis informs strategy. Strategy informs which gaps to close.
Q: How often should you do competitive gap analysis? A: Continuously for fast-moving markets. Quarterly formal reviews are standard. When competitors launch major features, do an immediate review. When you're planning roadmaps, review gaps.
Q: Should you tell your team about gaps? A: Yes, selectively. Sales and product should understand gaps. Engineering should understand gaps affecting their work. But overwhelming engineering with competitor features creates demoralizing comparisons. Share gaps as context for priorities, not as constant reminders of inadequacy.
Q: Can you analyze competitors if their code isn't public? A: Yes, but less deeply. Product inspection, user research, and sales feedback work for closed-source competitors. You understand what they offer, but not how they build it. Code analysis only works for open-source competitors.
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