Strategy question
You are a Product Manager for a B2B enterprise product. You need to do a competitor analysis but the products of your competitors are not openly accessible without a long drawn sales negotiation. How do you go about it?
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What this question tests
Resourcefulness in competitive research under real access constraints, checking whether you know legitimate alternative research methods beyond a product demo.
How to approach it
- Clarify the goal: understand competitor feature set, pricing, and positioning well enough to inform your own roadmap, without needing a full hands-on trial.
- List legitimate indirect sources: competitor documentation, help centers, and API references, which are often public even without a sales call.
- Use third-party signals: G2 and Capterra reviews, analyst reports like Gartner, and customer case studies published by the competitor itself.
- Talk to your own customers and prospects who have evaluated or used the competitor, since they can describe real feature gaps and pricing they encountered.
- Consider a structured evaluation call as a buyer, using a company email if ethically and legally appropriate, to see the sales-facing pitch and initial demo.
- Synthesize findings into a positioning map focused on gaps your product can win on, rather than a feature-for-feature comparison.
What a strong answer includes
- Lists multiple legitimate indirect sources, docs, reviews, and analyst reports, rather than relying on one weak method.
- Uses your own customers as a research channel, a resourceful and often-overlooked source of real competitive intelligence.
- Frames the output as a positioning map focused on winnable gaps, not just a raw feature comparison, showing strategic framing.
Common mistakes
- Suggesting only a fake buyer persona to get a demo, without considering the ethical and legal risk of misrepresentation.
- Producing a raw feature list with no strategic synthesis into where your product can actually win.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate information from indirect sources like reviews, which can be biased?
- How often would you refresh this competitive analysis given limited access?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop