Kudos to WhatsApp’s Product Managers

I recently read a Medium post by Pavel Durov, the founder of the social networking site VK (Facebook’s copycat) and the Telegram Messenger (WhatsApp’s competitor).

In the blog post titled “How To Predict WhatsApp Features” Durov claims the following:

Since we launched Telegram, WhatsApp raised the maximum size of videos and group chats several times. (…) [Their] progress, started exactly two weeks after Telegram was born, is evident.

He adds:

Within a few hours we are updating our iPhone and Android apps with some more features WhatsApp users might enjoy next year.

If what Durov says is indeed true, I must give kudos to the product managers working @ WhatsApp. It’s a multibillion dollar app and yet they are responding to the moves of their (much smaller) competitors.

I firmly believe that as a product manager, you need to keep tabs on all of your competitors and understand the ecosystem well. I’m not alone in this view. Here’s what Ben Horovitz says:

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.

That’s what I do at Yomp. In fact, one of the OKR’s I set for myself is to evaluate at least five of our competitors a month. It’s a very useful task — not only it gives me important insights into where the industry is heading, but it also gives me good ideas on how we can improve our own product.

Of course, knowing what your competitors are doing, doesn’t mean that you should copy their features and head in the same direction. No, you must have your own vision for the product, understand what your users and clients want and develop your own roadmap. But you should never be too pleased with your product (there is always something that can be done better) and you definitely don’t want to be taken by surprise by one of the competitors you did not take too seriously.