Why Knowing the Market Beats Watching Competitors?
Program Management, Chief of Staff Interview Question - How Do You Assess Competitive Threats? and How Do You Decide Where to Compete vs Not?
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Program Management / Chief of Staff Interview Question:
How Do You Assess Competitive Threats? and How Do You Decide Where to Compete vs Not?
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Most people think competitive analysis is about knowing your competitors.
It’s not.
It’s about understanding the market forces that make competitors relevant or irrelevant in the first place.
In interviews and in real strategy roles, surface-level competition analysis fails because it answers the wrong question. Listing competitors, comparing features, or walking through frameworks may sound structured, but none of it matters unless it helps you decide:
Where to play
How to win
Where not to compete at all
That’s the difference between analysis and strategy.
Whats inside:
What “Market Understanding” Actually Means?
How to master Market Understanding?
The Illusion of “Best Product Wins”
The Illusion of “Good” Competitive Analysis
Why Being “Best Known” Is a Market Outcome?
Interview Question: How Do You Assess Competitive Threats?
Interview Question: How Do You Decide Where to Compete vs Not?
Let’s get started,
What “Market Understanding” Actually Means?
At its core, market understanding means being able to answer this:
Why does the market behave the way it does today, and how might that change tomorrow?
It goes far beyond competitors.
True market understanding explains:
Why customers buy, switch, or stay
Why some products win despite being inferior
Why new entrants struggle even with strong offerings
Why timing matters as much as execution
Competitors operate within this system.
Markets define whether competitors matter at all.
