Background

Venafi is a SaaS software offering that helps companies secure their applications against threats by hackers.

Prior to this study, we had no documented comprehensive overview of what our competition’s product experience is and how our own stacks up.

This made it difficult for marketing and sales operations to accurately speak to our product’s strengths compared to the competition and to prepare how to answer questions about any weaknesses. It also made efforts by the product team to roadmap meaningful new product features that would fulfill the end user’s needs. Without the research the product roadmap was based on guesswork.

This SWOT analysis, combined with a direct comparison of the competitors’ documented UIs gave us a clear benchmark from which to build future roadmaps for our SaaS product. It also challenged the product team to think beyond feature parity and to look to the horizon toward building the best-in-class solution.

Synopsis

Method

Product Comparison

The initial step was to identify the set of competitors for comparison purposes. While the list of direct competitors is relatively small, a number of key juggernaut companies exist in tangential industries and were already encroaching on our space, as well as several startups that are beginning to make their way into the same product space.

For the purposes of this study, I made a preliminary scan of 8 of these companies and reduced these to 3 key competitors: 2 in direct competition and 1 encroaching company. I did this both to fulfill requests by the Sales team—because we were beginning to lose deals to the first—and because the third company’s UI stood out among the pack as being particularly threatening.

While it wasn’t possible for technical, legal, and ethical reasons to gain access to the competitors’ products directly, all three of those identified as our biggest threats have public documentation that allowed us to gather screenshots of their UIs.

Key to this project was understanding the key features of our product that customers buy our product for. This allowed the following possibilities:

  1. A page-by-page comparison with equivalent features in competitors’ products
  2. The means for determining what features we offered that our competition do not
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