Instead of copying what top competitors do well, analyze what they do poorly or neglect. Excelling in those specific areas creates a powerful differentiator. This is how Eleven Madison Park focused on rivals' bad coffee service to become the world's #1 restaurant.

A powerful innovation technique is "humanization": benchmarking your product against the ideal human experience, not a competitor's feature set. This raises the bar for excellence and surfaces opportunities for deep delight, like Google Meet's hand-raise feature mimicking in-person meetings.

When launching into a competitive space, first build the table-stakes features to achieve parity. Then, develop at least one "binary differentiator"—a unique, compelling capability that solves a major pain point your competitors don't, making the choice clear for customers.

Startups often fail by making a slightly better version of an incumbent's product. This is a losing strategy because the incumbent can easily adapt. The key is to build something so fundamentally different in structure that competitors have a very hard time copying it, ensuring a durable advantage.

When facing massive incumbents, avoid the trap of creating a slightly better version of their product. Instead, focus on being fundamentally different. Gamma chose to break the 16x9 slide paradigm that PowerPoint established, creating new primitives for visual communication.

Instead of comparing to competitors, compare your product to the ideal human interaction. Google Meet aimed to be like a real conversation, not just better than Zoom. This 'humanization' framework pushes teams to think beyond features and focus on a more intuitive, emotionally resonant experience.

Instead of imitating successful competitors' tactics, deconstruct them to understand the underlying psychological principle (e.g., scarcity, social proof). This allows for authentic adaptation to your specific context, avoiding the high risk of failure from blind copying which ignores differences in brand and audience.

Systematically identify frustrating moments in the customer journey, like waiting for the check. Instead of just minimizing the pain, reinvent these moments to be delightful. Guidara’s example of offering a complimentary bottle of cognac with the bill turns a negative into a generous, memorable gesture.

Instead of reacting defensively when a customer mentions a competitor, use it to probe their underlying needs. Asking 'What do you like about it?' helps differentiate between a critical feature gap ('the steak') and a superficial want ('the sizzle'), keeping you focused on solving real problems.