Hi, and welcome to my building-in-public blog. This week’s update is a short one. I wasted too much time reading articles and too little time documenting research. Also got a cold.

➡️ Last week, I said I’ll be working on:

  1. Find potential customers and talk to them, starting with people managers and HR professionals in my network —> Will start preparing questions in the coming weeks, but will only reach out once the year ends, as I doubt I’ll get many responses before that. Hopefully, understanding existing products should make for better questions.
  2. Build an MVP. TBD how functional it’s going to be (could be some mockups, a landing page, an actual add-on with basic functionality). The idea is to have something people can react to —> Will probably work on this in January/February.
  3. Understand existing solutions, and what could be a unique angle of attack —> quick update below, as this is work in progress

🤔Competitive analysis

What am I trying to understand by looking at the competition?

  • What are the unique things that make each competitor attractive?
  • What are common pain points with competitor’s products?
  • How could I find a unique angle of attack?
    • In which parts of employee engagement (1-on-1s, recognition, feedback, performance reviews, pulse surveys) could there be an opportunity to do something differently, and better?

After looking at 8 competitors in detail, here are my very rough hypotheses:

  • Most existing solutions seem robotic, life-less. There’s an opportunity to make engagement tools more fun.
  • Smaller companies (e.g. <200) want to do feedback, but current solutions are too-process focused
  • Most solutions offer some analytics, but none (few?) seem to frame them for discussion (i.e. here’s a ready-made slide on the team pulse that you can use in the all-hands)
  • Engagement surveys and recognition apps (e.g. kudos/high five/etc.) seem like the easiest to build but also most overdone/overcrowded spaces

➡️Next steps

  • Analyze ~40 more players in the space
  • Start framing questions for user interviews