When you’re competitor-aware, the product team knows the market, understands the customers, and is aware of what competitors in the space are doing to address the needs of the customers. When product teams obsess over competitors and their features, they make decisions while lacking access to any contextual information that can inform why the competitor is prioritizing specific features, strategies, or product changes. If you are a manager, it’s your responsibility to empower your team to seek out the customer insights and steer them towards thinking about customers rather than competitors, all while providing air cover for top-down requests to randomize them with sales-driven feature requests or feature directives from the leadership that have no customer basis.