What happened
The two co-authors of Product Management Simplified spent the session on one chapter of it, competitive and market analysis, and it was the most practical evening in the archive: a list of places to look and what to take from each.
Their frame was that a product manager needs three kinds of knowledge. Organisation knowledge, meaning a real rapport with engineering, QA, program management, UX, solution architects, support, marketing and sales, because each of them decides whether a launch works. Product knowledge, because you cannot write a use case for a CRM without knowing what a CRM is. And industry knowledge, which is where they spent the hour.
Six places to get it. The analyst reports, Gartner and Forrester and IDC, which are expensive enough that this is a company purchase rather than a personal one: they spent around fifty lakh on Forrester at ShieldSquare. The reports run thirty to fifty pages per player and list weaknesses, which is a feature backlog if you read them that way. The hype cycle and the technology adoption curve, for when a vice-president asks for a three-year roadmap and there is nobody sensible to ask, with the rule that anything already at the plateau of productivity is consumed and the left of the curve is where a new product goes. Review forums, G2 and Capterra and the app stores, which work on the same psychology as complaining about Flipkart in public, and where they warned that incentivised reviews are detectable if you read the comments rather than the scores. Social media, to see what a named competitor shipped last quarter. Company databases like Crunchbase and Owler, for who founded a rival, what they did before, and who funded them. And last, the competitor's own marketing: download the datasheets and white papers, sit through their webinars, all of it free after a sign-up form. Their quick version of that is to type a product name and the word "alternative" into Google.
The number that made the point was their own. ShieldSquare, a bot management product, reached the leader quadrant against Akamai, on two and a half million dollars of Series A funding, and the CEO had set that placement as an explicit KPI. They also mentioned, in passing, that the analysts themselves will talk to you and run sessions on subjects like GDPR, which most people never think to ask for.
Lokesh had come to product from QA, and named the skill that carried across: writing test cases teaches you to think through a path end to end, and a use case is the same discipline pointed at a different question.