Your Product at the Center: Connecting What You Build to the Market, Competitors, Customers, and Deals Around It

Ask a software company where its product stands and you will usually get four partial answers. The product team has the feature list in its planning tool. Product marketing has a competitor deck. Sales has the deals in the CRM. Someone in strategy has a market-size slide from last year's plan. Each slice is accurate on its own terms. None of them puts the product in the middle with everything around it.

That gap shows up in how leaders feel about what they build. In a 2018 Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey of 169 respondents, only 17% of executives were very confident that their organizations were getting the greatest possible return on their product development investments, and nearly 30% had little or no confidence at all.[1] Nearly 80% said they would be more confident if more decisions were based on data instead of intuition, and 90% said a more detailed analysis of how their products perform in the market would raise their confidence. Yet asked what their organizations do to speed up product development, only 34% said they provide information on market, customer, and competitor challenges in a timely way.

Most market research about software runs the other way from what those teams need. It profiles other vendors: who leads a category, what a rival charges, and what its buyers complain about. That is useful, but it is outside-in. In the same report, Adi Alon of Accenture Strategy named the starting point for product development: integrating customer, product, and market intelligence data.[1] This post starts from the inside, with your own product, and then connects the market, rivals, customers, and deals around it.

1. Start with what you build

A buyer meets your product as a set of features in a category, so the first job is to put it on the same map as everything it competes with. In PYRAMYD that map is the Feature Taxonomy in the Products hub: a vendor-neutral tree of each software category's features, from modules to capabilities to individual features. Each feature's profile lists the vendors that implement it and its maturity, with stored scores across eight dimensions.

Then read your own structure. Products › Structures shows any vendor's products, modules, capabilities, and features as a graph you can click through, or as a library of cards. Pick your own company first and see how the graph has mapped what you sell; then pick a rival and count its capabilities against yours. If a company has not been mapped yet, the page says so instead of guessing.

Product 360 fills in the rest of a product's profile: its integrations, whether a public API is on record, and its deployment and support options, with a SWOT, its top competitors, and its rank in its category on the Overview.

What this settles: whether you and your rivals are even describing the same features, before anyone argues about who is ahead.

2. Put it in its market

A product can only grow as far as its market lets it. Markets › Categories opens each of the graph's 2,546 software categories, and a category's Market tab estimates its size and growth over time, by segment, region, and industry, with the sources the estimate rests on and a confidence level.

Take a company that sells CRM software. On 8 October 2026, the graph linked 1,442 products from 1,360 vendors to its CRM Software category, with 211,182 reviews between them. That is the field your product is judged against, long before a deal is lost.

Market 360 turns a category into your market. Define it from one to five categories, narrow it by up to five industries, countries, and roles, and name the product you sell. It sizes the market in total, serviceable, and obtainable companies, with its method and assumptions shown, and once you have at least three won deals it adds the obtainable revenue, worked out from your median won deal. Its whitespace view ranks the categories inside your market by buyer demand per vendor and by gaps in reviewers' satisfaction.

What this settles: which market to go after next and how large it is, with the method on the page instead of in someone's head.

3. Line it up against its rivals

Most deals have a rival in them, and many teams cannot see which one. Crayon's 2025 State of Competitive Intelligence report found sellers going head to head with a competitor in nearly 7 in 10 deals, and 44% of teams without visibility into which competitors are in which deals.[2] What a feature is worth depends on that field, too. Economists Greg Allenby, Jeff Brazell, John Howell, and Peter Rossi define a feature's market value as the change in profits with and without it once the market settles, and that cannot be worked out from demand alone: it also needs the competing offerings and the costs.[3]

The Competitors hub starts from the rival. Competitor 360 opens each competitor you track with its employees, revenue, funding, average score, products, and signals across the top. Its Products tab lists the rival's branded products with their review counts, scores, and pricing coverage; its Customers tab shows the accounts that review its products; and its Markets tab shows the industries and regions it targets.

Then put your product beside theirs. Comparisons sets products side by side in one matrix whose rows are standard features, picked by category, industry, country, and role, so every vendor is measured the same way. A battlecard for your product against a rival, drafted by APEX from reviews, news, the rival's website, and product features, adds a feature-by-feature matchup on its Capabilities tab that shows who wins each shared feature on the stored scores. And Win/Loss reads any rival's public reviews for its top features by review score, why buyers leave it, and what they consider alongside it.

What this settles: where you lead, where you trail, and what to say about each in front of a buyer.

4. Tie it to the customers and deals that pay for it

The last connections are the ones only you can supply: your own customers and deals. Connect your CRM in Workspace › Library › Connectors. There are about 200 connectors in the catalogue; Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Asana, and Productboard are in use with customers today. Syncs run on demand, when you choose Sync now.

Once your deals are in, Win/Loss splits closed deals by deal size, industry, company size, and buyer persona, each with its win rate and lost revenue, wherever the deals carry those fields. Account 360 shows the software each account runs, found from technologies detected at the company and from its employees' own reviews, with what those employees say about each product. Accounts › Discover builds an ideal customer profile from the people who review your product, scores account lists against it, and finds the companies whose staff review a rival's product, with the contacts to reach.

When a buyer sends an RFP, RFI, or RFQ, Opportunities extracts every requirement and matches each software requirement to a standard capability, so the buyer's wording lands on the same feature map your product sits on. And Products › Gaps brings it back to what you build: its Customers column counts the distinct customers behind each feature gap and the kinds of evidence that back it, such as lost deals, interviews, surveys, and calls. It counts only evidence that is linked to a feature and names a customer.

What this settles: which customers and deals each product decision touches.

What each team decides from the same picture

Put the four connections together and the teams that depend on the product stop working from different copies of it. That is the job PYRAMYD was built for:

PYRAMYD is the intelligence platform for software companies. It connects your product to the market, competitors, customers, and deals around it, and puts agents to work on that evidence, so product, marketing, and sales teams decide what to build, how to position it, and how to win.

• Product decides what to build: the gaps the most customers raise, set beside what rivals already ship and how buyers score it, in Gaps, the Feature Taxonomy, and Comparisons.
• Marketing decides how to position it: the features where you lead on the stored scores, the weaknesses buyers name in a rival's reviews, and the market where incumbents leave room, in Battlecards, Win/Loss, and Market 360.
• Sales decides how to win: the battlecard for the rival in the deal, the requirement map for the RFP, and the account's own software and what its staff say about it, in Battlecards, Opportunities, and Account 360.

The harder problem is rarely the tooling. In ProductPlan's 2023 State of Product Management survey of more than 1,500 product professionals, 37% named getting cross-functional alignment on product direction as their biggest challenge.[4] Craft.io's 2023 report, from a survey of 500 product professionals, found that the top problem in collecting feedback, named by 42%, was feedback that is all over the place and hard to digest because it comes from different sources.[5] One connected picture will not settle every argument, but it means the argument is about the same facts.

Start in the middle

Outside-in research tells you about other vendors. The decisions that matter most to a software company are about its own product: what to build, how to position it, and how to win with it. Put your product in the middle, connect its market, rivals, customers, and deals one at a time, and let product, marketing, and sales read the same picture. Start with the connection your teams argue about most.