🔥Hot take.
Monitoring, NOT obsessing, on your competition is how the better products get built.
Steve Jobs -> the PC
Musk -> the car
Happy Joes -> the local pizza shop
Being the differentiator for what is not available to consumers is the sweet spot. How else can you know if your refined product can do something better?
I think the answer is not so either/or.
It seems you must focus on your customer in all situations no matter what.
But then depending on the moves your competitors make and the ways your customers respond, you probably have no choice sometimes but to make some changes.
All this stuff with Clubhouse is a good example. Twitter is building Twitter Spaces and there's no way they'd be doing that if Clubhouse didn't do it first. But this doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It's probably a very very good idea. But Twitter's main focus should still be on the customer despite this side project experiment with Twitter Spaces.