Tanguy Crusson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Any other lessons from the HipChat experience before we shift to a different product? I've got two, I'm going to do them quickly. The first one is competitive myopia, don't fall for it. At some point, the Slack was really gaining round and gaining round and capturing more of the mindshare. And everyone on Twitter was always loving them. Even when they had outrages, they were getting congratulated. I was like, "This is working mad." But the love was so strong, and the way we tended to revert back is to our functional side of the brain going, okay, we just need this one more feature. We just need this one more feature, we just need this one more feature. And we ended up reacting to whatever. ... more feature. We just need this one more feature. And we ended up reacting to whatever the competitor was doing, which I think is really, really bad because that's when we lost basically what made HipChat successful so far, which is to serve some users really well. And instead we ended up fast following based on what the competitor was doing, which is super bad because your competitor, if you think of what they do as an iceberg, the top side, what comes out of the water is what they've shipped in terms of features, but it's based on all this stuff that they've built in terms of research and understanding of their customer base and everything else. And so you're just seeing the manifestation of what they were thinking maybe a year ago, based on what they're shipping now. But we got there. And now whenever I work, I tend to try and ignore competition other than watching every three months or so, seeing what came out, if there's anything we should be worried about, afraid of, stuff like that. But really just try to disconnect all the creative process and the research process from what competitors do, because you can't compare. The market is huge. There are hundreds of thousands of companies out there. Not everyone has the same needs. We serve a particular set of segments. We would do better learning from them to then expand to the others than watching what competition is doing. And this is advice you give to your teams, just ignore the competition, maybe pay attention at big announcements and things like that?…

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