"Products don't compete. Companies do." — Steve Jobs
After more than 2 decades across multiple industries and companies: some competing head-to-head, others in the fascinating position of competing with their own customers - cool huh - especially now with AI can build it in no time and cost promise?
Your product is your entry ticket. Not your competitive advantage.
Here's what actually makes you you:
Marketing: Your campaign, your marketing budget, your message, your timing. Two identical products can have wildly different outcomes based on this alone.
Sales: Relationships, process, trust. The best product doesn't always win. The best-selling product does.
Customer Support(or customer experience... if you fancy): Retention is built here. Loyalty is built here. Reputation is built here.
The Product Itself: Security, quality, compliance, reliability. These are the foundation. The "feature number one" is reliability (I said this phrase probably 100 times in at least 6 companies... sticked 50% of the time...).
And tying it all together? The famous "Operational Excellence".
It's not a buzzword. It's a discipline. Across every industry, the companies that sustain competitive advantage are the ones that execute consistently - not just brilliantly (accidentally?) once.
Napoleon said it best:
"If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way."
That's operational excellence in one sentence. It's the 100th customer call handled with the same care as the 1st. Today's pull request that doesn't downgrade your test coverage score. Deployment that doesn't put the whole system down. A migration project that doesn't burn half of your crew out. It's the quality process no one sees, but everyone feels. It's the on-time delivery that becomes the expectation, not the exception.
Your competitors have products too. What they may not have is your system: your people, your processes, your standards, your culture. That's where the real competition happens.
PS: And yes, all your competitors also have OpenAI Pro and Anthropic Max, so I would not count on this one much ;). Just saying.