When a competitor makes a move, do you react or stay the course? Two product leaders share what they got right—and what they wish they'd done differently.
Competitive pressure doesn't announce itself cleanly. It arrives as a panicked Slack from sales. Then a message from customer success. Then leadership on your calendar. And suddenly everyone is looking at product waiting for an answer.
The instinct is to react. Ship something. Match the competitor feature for feature. Show everyone you're paying attention. But the product leaders who navigate this moment well, the ones who come out the other side with stronger products and clearer strategies, almost never do that.
In Episode 3 of Product Leaders Lab, I spoke with two leaders who faced exactly this moment. Nesrine Changuel, former Google PM and author of Product Delight, joined Google Meet the week COVID hit, just as Zoom was becoming the default for every meeting on earth. And Partho Ghosh, VP of Product at Uberall and formerly at Hootsuite, watched competitors close in on Hootsuite from every direction while his own team resisted the call that the data kept pointing toward.
Same pressure. Completely different moves. Both deliberate. Both hard. Both worked.
Most of what gets written about competitive strategy is about the what: what to build, what to cut, what to copy. Very little of it is about the how: how to stay clear-headed when the noise is loud, how to hold your team together when the pressure is real, and how to make a decision you can defend six months later.
The real competitive threat isn't always the competitor. It's the panic they create inside your organization. Sales gets nervous and starts pushing for features. Leadership wants a response, any response. Longtime employees get protective. And in the middle of all that noise, product leaders have to make deliberate calls that often run counter to what everyone around them wants to hear.
Nesrine and Partho both faced this. And they handled it very differently.
When Nesrine joined Google Meet, the product had to scale from niche tool to global infrastructure practically overnight. Zoom was everywhere. Microsoft Teams was shipping weekly. The obvious move was to watch what competitors were building and match it.
Nesrine didn't do that.
Instead, she spent the first two to three months doing something that would be difficult to justify in most organizations under that kind of pressure: she stopped and listened.
"The first two to three months, it was not about what should we build or what features should we add. I spent those two to three months trying to explore the emotional impact of this new behavior."
What she heard wasn't a list of feature requests. It was a set of emotional states. Users felt bored. They felt unseen, like they were behind a screen and nobody noticed them. They felt disconnected from the people they were supposed to be collaborating with.
These aren't product gaps. They're human experiences. And Nesrine built her entire competitive response around solving them.
The reframe she used is worth sitting with. Rather than asking "what does Zoom have that we don't?", her team asked a different question entirely:
"We were focused and obsessed about something else, not comparing our product to the competitors, but comparing our product to: if my product was a human, how would the experience be better?"
This changes the competitive game completely. You're no longer chasing a competitor's roadmap. You're chasing the best possible human experience of the problem you're solving. And no competitor can copy that, because they'd have to know your users as well as you do.
She applied this same thinking at Spotify, comparing the product not to Apple Music or Amazon Music, but to radio, because radio was the actual default behavior they were trying to replace. That's a much more interesting competitive question than who has the best playlist algorithm.
When stakeholders pushed back, she had a framework for that too. When internal pressure mounted to build lossless audio because Tidal and Amazon had it, Nesrine ran the RICE score. What percentage of users actually care about uncompressed audio? Less than a percent. What's the user impact of search by lyrics compared to lossless? Much higher. The data made the case so she didn't have to argue from instinct alone.
One of her sharpest insights came from investigating how to address user boredom. The instinct was to make the product more fun. But she found that the antidote to boredom isn't fun; it's feeling alive. "If you go to Disney every day," she said, "it's not fun anymore." That insight, earned from going deep into user emotion rather than surface-level feature comparison, is what made Google Meet's competitive response distinctive.
What this approach requires: patience and conviction. Nesrine spent months listening before building anything. When competitors are shipping weekly and leadership wants to see movement, that kind of discipline is genuinely hard to hold. You need data, and you need the ability to say "that's not what our users actually need" when everyone around you is pointing at a competitor's announcement.
Partho's situation at Hootsuite had a different shape. The competitive threat wasn't one fast-moving rival; it was compression from both sides. Buffer and Later were eating the SMB segment from below. Sprout Social was closing in from the middle, moving upstream fast. And Hootsuite's free plan, thirteen years old with a million active users and eighteen million downloads, was quietly becoming more liability than asset.
The easy move was to fight for every customer in every segment. Partho made a harder one.
"Focus is the biggest thing. Are we really going to put all of our effort competing against these 30, 40 million ARR players or are we trying to encroach on the top side?"
That's the real question under the surface-level competitive threat: are we competing in the right arena at all? And Hootsuite's answer was no. They needed to move upmarket, mid-market and enterprise, and the free plan was getting in the way of everything required to do that.
Killing a free plan that had been core to the company's identity since 2008 is not a small decision. And the internal resistance was as significant as the external pressure.
"Any kind of discussion around removing free was met with resentment. Like, let's not even talk about this. Why are we even going down this path?"
Long-tenured employees, people who had built careers around serving small businesses and solopreneurs, saw the free plan as a promise. Removing it felt like a betrayal. Partho described feeling like "a grim reaper" during the process. That's not hyperbole. It's what it actually feels like to push for a structural change when your colleagues see it as abandoning the people who made the company.
The execution was careful. They tested the messaging first on small cohorts. It leaked to Twitter and Reddit, as these things do, but the reaction was less catastrophic than feared. Then they gave users four months notice with a tiered discount campaign. Discounts scaled over time, with users receiving 90 to 95 percent off in the final week.
The results of that campaign told the real story:
"If there was a million active users, let's call it half a million of them were never going to be customers. And even at that rate, they didn't convert. That kind of proved our point as well."
Half a million people offered a 90 percent discount who still didn't pay. They were never going to pay. The free plan was serving a segment that had no path to revenue, and it was costing focus, development capacity, and marketing dollars every day it ran.
After sunsetting free, the trial-to-paid ratio, which had been declining for three years, started improving. One percentage point. Then two. And Partho was clear about what each of those points was worth: seven figures, easily.
What this approach requires: courage and a thick skin. Partho was explicit that sunsetting a free plan is a one-way door. You can't announce it, reverse course, and expect to recover cleanly. Once you make this call, you own the outcome, the good version and the bad version. And the emotional cost to team members, to users, and to the company's sense of identity is real and lasting.
Nesrine and Partho were both responding to competitive pressure. But they were solving different problems.
Nesrine's threat was about product differentiation: how do you stay meaningfully better when a well-resourced competitor is moving fast and your users are overwhelmed? Her answer: stop competing on features and start competing on emotional depth. Know your users better than any competitor can, and build against the best possible human experience of the problem.
Partho's threat was about strategic positioning: you can't win a fight on every front at once, and some of the infrastructure you've built is now slowing you down. His answer: acknowledge that clearly, make the hard call, and accept the emotional cost that comes with it.
Most product leaders facing competitive pressure default to the reactive middle: add features to match competitors, protect existing customers at all costs, try to be competitive everywhere at once. Both Nesrine and Partho rejected that approach. They made deliberate bets about where to focus and what to let go, and they had the data and the conviction to hold those positions when the pressure was highest.
The question worth sitting with: is your current competitive threat a product differentiation problem or a positioning problem? The answer shapes everything about what you should do next.
Both of these stories involve something most teams resist: the period before the response.
Nesrine spent months listening before building. Partho spent months running experiments and building internal alignment before pulling the trigger. Neither of them reacted immediately to the pressure they were under.
Reactive moves feel fast and decisive. They're often neither. They create a false sense of momentum, shipping something, matching a feature, making an announcement, while leaving the underlying strategic question unresolved. The next competitive threat lands and the cycle starts over.
The leaders who handle these moments well are the ones who slow down long enough to ask: what is this competitive threat actually revealing about our users, our positioning, and where we should be focused? That question is harder to answer than "what did they ship?" But it's the question worth asking.
Competitive pressure is a permanent condition in B2B SaaS. There will always be a competitor shipping something, a sales team asking questions, and a leadership team wanting a response. The product leaders who navigate this well aren't the ones with the fastest reaction time. They're the ones who've built the habits, the data practice, and the team alignment to make deliberate decisions under pressure.
Nesrine and Partho did it in different ways, in different companies, facing different threats. But both of them came out of the competitive moment with a clearer product, a sharper strategy, and a team that knew exactly who they were building for.
That's the outcome worth building toward.
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Episode 3 of the Product Leaders Lab wherever you get your podcasts:
