Chasing Competitors Instead of User Needs

by Jeff Humble

Dear Reader,

Have you ever had a CEO who was overly obsessed with beating the competition? I know I have.

You may not have realized exactly how this can be toxic. So, I'd like to help you out with two case studies.

Here is a tale of two companies and how they handled the competition.

The first took a company-first approach while the second took a user-first approach.

It goes like this...

Company-First: The Rise & Fall of Google+

Google+ was a social network meant to compete with Facebook's startling growth in the early 2010s. As companies are prone to do, Google looked at a product's success and thought they could do it better.

So they put all their efforts behind the new social media venture:

Google’s ubiquitous product suite meant it could manufacture some real growth by linking to the product. They managed to get to 50 million users in only 88 days, which was even more impressive back in the early 2000s.

Showcasing their lack of customer perspective, Google pushed the tool hard, even forcing users to create a Google+ account to comment on YouTube, hoping to get short-term growth in customer adoption.

Because Google+ started on the defensive and never caught up to Facebook or Twitter. There were some short-term gains, but they never turned into long-term success.

By 2015, Google+ had 2.2B users, but only 9% posted content publicly—most accounts were inactive.

Many of the original team behind Google+ have since come out with the real story. Chris Messina, one of the UX designers behind the project (and inventor of the hashtag), bemoans the lack of customer perspective in his Medium post about the project:

“What’s going on with Google+? Where is it headed? What the fuck is it for, anyway?… To this day, I still don’t know what Google+ is for, let alone better at than Facebook. Some might argue it’s “cleaner” and has fewer ads, but even those won’t be lasting competitive advantages.”

It wasn’t just the designers who had negative things to say. Steve Yegge, an engineer at Google, summarized the failings of Google+ perfectly in a Gizmodo article:

“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.”

If only those short-term company goals could have been balanced with a differentiated long-term vision for the customer. Google+ is a textbook example of ignoring the customer perspective while pursuing a company-first strategy.

Let Google+ be a cautionary tale to those trying to beat the competition at their own game, as Google tried to do with Facebook.

Even with Google’s immense budget and software prowess, they failed. If Google couldn’t do it at the height of their game, your company certainly can’t do it.

User-First: How Slack Revolutionized Work

Rather than copying the competitors, Slack created a whole new category of workplace communication by listening to its users.

One doesn’t often think of enterprise communication software going viral, but that’s precisely what Slack did with its customer-first strategy of Slack, which feels more like a social game than a working app.

Originally developed as a chat-based game, Slack was almost addictive to use. With its colorful visual design, responsiveness, and GIPHY integration, work communication was about to move into the 21st century.

When Slack launched in 2013, email and workplace chat apps like HipChat already existed. Instead of positioning Slack as just another chat tool, the team focused on a deeper customer need: reducing workplace friction and improving collaboration.

They purposefully differentiated their product from email tools because they heard customer frustrations with email. Users wanted modern interactions and hated trying to find things in email threads.

Even though they had early success, they didn't launch with a rigid roadmap, Slack built its product based on continuous user feedback from early adopters, including teams at Rdio and GREE. Some key user-driven features included:

• Powerful search & archives (users wanted to find past conversations easily)
• Integrations with tools like Trello, Google Drive, and GitHub (users don’t have to leave Slack to get stuff done)
• Custom emoji & reactions (customers wanted ways to express tone quickly)

This continuous customer feedback cycle did wonders for Slack’s growth. In less than two years, it went from 0 to 2 million daily active users and 570k paid users, primarily through organic team adoption rather than paid marketing.

Slack’s vision and customer focus can be seen in how the CEO, Stewart Butterfield, talks about the app’s customer-first vision:

“Slack wasn’t just chat. It reduced our reliance on email, made work more async, and created a sense of presence.”

Slack’s commitment to a customer-first strategy has helped it define a new category of work communication in a very profitable way by monetizing the viral nature of their product.

The Takeaway: Long-term growth isn’t about copying competitors—it’s about finding and solving a problem they haven’t addressed.

I hope that gives you something to share next time leadership chases the competition.

If you want to learn more about strategy and balancing customers with competitors, check out my course called Defining UX Strategy.

In the course, I'll walk you through designing a user-first strategy from scratch.

Read more case studies about company vs. user thinking in the full article: Why Company-First Strategies Fail (And How Customer-First Thinking Wins on Jeff's Blog.

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Until next time, focus on those customer needs, not the competition! ✌️

​ Jeff Humble ​UX Strategist & Co-Founder ​The Fountain Institute ​

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P.S. Get €300 off Defining UX Strategy: LIVE for a limited time. Click here to learn more.​