The Good Enough Strategy: When to Stop Chasing Feature Parity

Every product manager has felt the pressure: "We need to match what Competitor X has." The sales team demands it. Customers ask for it. And before you know it, your roadmap becomes a copy of someone else's playbook.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: feature parity is often a losing strategy. It keeps you reacting instead of leading. It dilutes your focus. And in markets like cybersecurity, where the threat landscape shifts daily, chasing yesterday's features means you're always behind.

I've sat in countless roadmap reviews where half the items existed purely because "the market leader has it." Nobody could articulate why our customer needed it. Nobody had validated it. It was just... there. That's how product strategy dies—not with a bang, but with a thousand tiny compromises.

The Trap of "Good Enough"

I'm not saying ignore the competition. I'm saying there's a difference between "good enough" in the areas that matter to your buyer—and endless feature churn in areas that don't move the needle.

The key is to define "good enough" rigorously. For us in endpoint security, detection coverage had to be solid—customers would not switch to a solution that missed obvious threats. But did we need to match every integration, every report format, every dashboard widget? No. Those were table stakes at best, and distractions at worst.

The temptation to say yes to every "we need what they have" request is strong. Sales loses a deal and blames the missing feature. A customer threatens to churn. The quarterly review demands growth. In that moment, adding the feature feels like the path of least resistance. But each yes compounds. Before long, your team is scattered across two dozen initiatives, none of them excellent.

The best product strategy isn't about having everything. It's about being exceptional at what your customer actually cares about.

Finding Your Wedge

At Morphisec, we learned this the hard way. The market was saturated with detection tools. We could have spent years trying to match feature lists. Instead, we doubled down on prevention—stopping attacks before they execute, without signatures. That became our wedge.

The framework I use: Map the competitive landscape. Identify 2–3 dimensions where "good enough" suffices. Pick one dimension where you will be meaningfully better. Invest 80% there.

For prevention, that meant saying no to a lot of things. Custom reports? We kept them simple. Integrations? We focused on the ones that mattered for the prevention story. The result: a product that did one thing exceptionally well, instead of ten things adequately. Customers who cared about that one thing chose us. The rest chose someone else—and that was okay.

The hard part is deciding which dimension earns the 80%. It's not always obvious. We ran discovery with buyers who'd chosen us and buyers who'd chosen competitors. The pattern emerged: our winners cared deeply about zero-day protection and were willing to accept fewer bells and whistles elsewhere. Our losers wanted a full-featured platform—and we were never going to win that battle against incumbents with ten times our headcount.

When "Good Enough" Fails

Not every dimension can be "good enough." Some are binary. In security, missing a critical threat is unforgivable—customers will not tolerate gaps in core protection. The trick is knowing which dimensions are binary for your buyer and which are negotiable.

We maintained a "table stakes" list: capabilities that, if missing, would disqualify us entirely. Everything else was fair game for "good enough." That list changed by segment—enterprise buyers cared about audit trails and compliance reports; SMBs cared about simplicity and time-to-value. Segment matters.

The Competitor Obsession Trap

It's natural to watch competitors. They're in your space. They're winning deals. The dangerous part is when watching becomes copying. I've seen roadmaps that were 60% "Competitor X has this, we need it too." That's not strategy—that's follow-the-leader. The leader sets the tempo. You're always reacting.

Instead, use competitors as input, not as a blueprint. What are they good at? Where do they cut corners? What do their customers complain about? That intelligence informs your wedge. "We're better at X because they compromise on Y" is a valid strategy. "We have everything they have" is a recipe for mediocrity.

Practical Next Steps

• Audit your roadmap: How many items exist purely because a competitor has them?
• Talk to winning customers: What made them choose you? Double down on that.
• Create a "non-goals" doc: Explicitly state what you won't build. It's liberating.

Start with the audit. I promise you'll find at least 20% of your backlog that nobody can defend. Those items are stealing oxygen from the ones that could actually differentiate you. Cut them. Your team will thank you. Your customers might not even notice—and if they do, you've learned something valuable about what actually matters.

The non-goals doc is particularly powerful. Write down what you explicitly will not build in the next 12 months. Share it internally. It gives sales permission to say "that's not us" instead of "we'll add it to the roadmap." It gives engineering clarity. And it forces leadership to commit to a direction rather than hedging every bet. Strategy is as much about what you omit as what you pursue.

One last point: good enough isn't permanent. Markets shift. What was "good enough" in 2023 might be table stakes in 2025. Revisit your framework annually. The goal isn't to freeze your strategy—it's to make it explicit so you can change it intentionally rather than drifting.