Is achieving feature parity with incumbents enough to compete effectively, or does a challenger need something more?

Shreyas Doshi · Aug 3, 2022

A small team competing against entrenched incumbents should not try to close the whole table-stakes feature gap, because doing so yields an undifferentiated poor substitute for products with a ten to fifteen year lead

At Stripe Terminal, building every requested table-stakes feature would have taken five years with a tiny team and left them with a barely differentiated product

Scope: case of a tiny team against powerful incumbents in a long-established category

29:52 20 Product: Shreyas Doshi on The Three Different Types of Product Leaders and How To Hire Them, The 6 Different Product Metrics You Need To Know and What Good is For Each of Them & Table Stakes Features vs Wow Features; What To Prioritise

Noah Desai Weiss · Jun 16, 2023

Email is the lowest common denominator that reaches everyone, so a cross-organization communication product like Slack Connect has to be 10x better than email to justify itself

Everyone can already be reached by email, so the question is what you can deliver that is dramatically better than the universal default

Scope: framed as the internal debate at the time

32:04 20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise

Noah Desai Weiss · Jun 16, 2023

Slack's Posts feature failed to gain adoption because the speed and quality bar for something as ubiquitous as a rich text editor was higher than Slack could hit and customers had good-enough alternatives

The data showed customers found it obviously valuable in principle but didn't use it, because a slow rich-document experience loses to the tool already open in another tab

34:36 20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise

Christian Kleinerman · Sep 22, 2023

A product offering a subset of a market leader's capabilities but that is dramatically easier to use will win a following — feature parity is not the way in

SQL Server came from behind Oracle and IBM by simplifying rather than matching every feature, and Snowflake's story followed the same pattern: delightful simplicity drives adoption

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Harry Stebbings · Aug 29, 2025

In some categories the road to the start line is so long that achieving feature parity only makes you equal to incumbents, which isn't compelling

Messaging products are very hard to bring even to parity with leading providers

Scope: especially messaging products

16:54 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi

Shreyas Doshi · Aug 3, 2022

New products entering crowded spaces should pick a customer segment the incumbent serves poorly and build highly differentiated experiences for that segment's unfulfilled needs

Incumbents deprioritize features that matter enormously to specific pockets of customers because they aren't important across their whole base, leaving highly dissatisfied segments

33:48 Target underserved segments of incumbent customers with differentiated experiences

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

The only way to break through the noise is a fundamentally different product for a very specific customer who loves it enough to tell friends; you cannot take on an entrenched player head-on no matter how much money you throw at it

Word-of-mouth from a narrowly targeted, deeply loved product is what keeps acquisition costs low, whereas a head-on attack on an incumbent is a recipe for failure

40:46 Narrow deeply loved product not capital intensity is required to break an entrenched incumbent