Product people are obsessed with differentiation. It's one of the first things they reach for when defining strategy - how do we stand out, what makes us unique, where's our competitive moat? Nobody wants to build something that's indistinguishable from the myriad other products already in the market. But differentiation for its own sake is one of the most common ways product teams waste time and money on things that don't actually matter.
Being different is easy. Being better is what wins.
Better beats different
The fear, of course, is commoditisation. If your product looks and feels like everyone else's, then you're in a commodity market, and commodity markets are brutal. The market sets the price, your margins get squeezed and you're competing on cost alone. Nobody wants to win a race to the bottom.
So product teams chase uniqueness. We've built an entire professional vocabulary around it: "unique selling points," "competitive differentiators," features that nobody else has - because they believe that being one-of-a-kind gives them pricing power. And in principle, they're not wrong. At the far end of the spectrum, if you're the only company offering something, you can charge whatever you like.
The problem is that being unique doesn't mean being valuable. I could build a completely unique motorcycle by fitting it with triangular wheels. Nobody else would sell one. I'd have zero competition. I'd also have zero customers, because nobody in their right mind would buy it.
Differentiation only matters if the thing that makes you different is something people actually want. And in my experience, product teams spend far too much time asking "how can we be different?" and nowhere near enough time asking "how can we be better?"
Sameness as a shortcut
If you're a UX designer, you'll have spent your career being told that consistency and familiarity are virtues. Design patterns exist for a reason - users already know how a tab bar works, how a search field behaves, how a settings page should be laid out. You don't reinvent these things because everyone knows that breaking convention creates friction.
The same principle applies at a product level, especially when you're trying to break into an established market. Looking and sounding like the well-established players can actually be a shortcut to product-market fit. The "must-haves" from your Kano analysis have already been defined by the market - buyers already know what a product in your category needs to do. If you deliberately ignore those expectations in the name of being different, then you're not innovating. You're just being eccentric.
The film industry has understood this for decades. New writers and producers pitch their work as a composite - "it's Saving Private Ryan meets Uncle Buck, set in space." It sounds ridiculous, but it's an incredibly effective way to convey what something is by referencing things people are already familiar with.
But playing on familiarity only gets you so far. It gets a prospect from "I've never heard of you" to "oh, you're in the same space as the tools I already use." The question then becomes - why should they pick you over the multitude of other products that do the same thing?
Better wins
The answer is almost never "because we're different." It's "because we're better." And the companies that dominate their markets usually got there by doing the same thing as everyone else, only doing it properly.
Stripe didn't invent online payment processing. PayPal had been around for years, and there were plenty of other payment gateways available when Stripe launched in 2011. What Stripe did was make the developer experience so much better that engineers started choosing it instinctively. The API was cleaner, the documentation was superb, and you could get a payment form running in minutes rather than the days it took with the competition. Nothing about it was conceptually different - it processed payments, same as everyone else. It was just dramatically better at the bit that mattered most to its users.
Figma didn't invent screen design tools. Sketch had owned that space for years, and before that there was Photoshop, Illustrator, even Fireworks (I'm showing my age now). Designers had been pushing pixels around for decades. Figma's advantage was that it ran in the browser and let multiple designers collaborate in real time. Same job, same category, but better at the specific thing that frustrated design teams most - the endless cycle of "which version is the latest?" and "can you send me the file?" Adobe eventually tried to buy them for $20bn. Not because they'd invented a new category, but because they'd done an existing job so well that nobody wanted to go back.
The pattern across both is the same. They didn't win by zigging when everyone else zagged. They won by doing the same job everyone else was doing, only doing it so well that the competition couldn't keep up.
Advantages, not differentiators
When I'm thinking about product strategy, I try not to use the word "differentiators". It puts you in the wrong mindset - it makes you think about what's different rather than what's better. Instead, I think about advantages. What advantages do we have, or can we build, that will make a customer choose us?
Sometimes that advantage is something unique - a piece of domain expertise nobody else has, a technology that gives you a genuine edge, a relationship with a segment of the market that competitors can't replicate. But more often than not, the advantage is simpler than that. It's a faster onboarding experience. A more responsive support team. A product that just works without requiring a three-day training course. These aren't unique - any competitor could, in theory, do the same. But the point is that they haven't.
And this is where competitive analysis actually earns its keep - though not in the way most product teams use it. The real value isn't in finding gaps to fill or features to copy. It's in sales. When a customer tells you they're going to churn unless you can provide this, that and the other, it's incredibly helpful to know which of your competitors - if any - can offer that same combination, and at what price. That's what gives you the confidence to push back without panicking about losing the deal. Using competitive analysis to zig while everyone else zags? That's a positioning exercise, not a product strategy.
The goal isn't uniqueness
The goal should be competitiveness. You don't need to be different from your competitors. You need to be better than them at the things your customers actually care about. That means spending less time staring at feature comparison charts and more time talking to the people who use your product, understanding what frustrates them, and fixing it before anyone else does.
Differentiation is what you get when you execute better than the competition. It's an outcome, not a strategy. And the moment you start chasing it as a goal in its own right, you end up building triangular wheels.
