Why Copying Your Competitor’s Features Doesn’t Work
Your roadmap is full. Your backlog is noisy. Your revenue? Flat.
It’s a pattern we see in too many ecommerce teams: chasing progress by building more and copying faster. New features roll out. Competitor screenshots get bookmarked. Stakeholders feel productive. But nothing changes where it counts.
Because more features doesn’t mean more value. And copying your competitors doesn’t make you more competitive.
The illusion of progress
Let’s be honest. Feature volume feels good. It’s tangible. Visible. It gives everyone something to point at when results are flat. “Look what we shipped.” “Look what they’ve launched.” “We should build something like that.”
But most of the time, these new features don’t earn their keep. They clutter the customer journey. They introduce bugs. They distract teams from real performance issues hiding in plain sight.
Worse—over time—they slow everything down. Decision-making stalls. Priorities blur. And instead of clearing a path for growth, your backlog becomes a graveyard of half-used features nobody’s willing to kill.
What looks like momentum is often misalignment in disguise.
The competitor envy trap
Now layer in another familiar pattern: competitor envy.
A rival adds a fancy new filter, a loyalty widget, or yet another UX toggle. And suddenly your team’s discussing it like it’s gospel. The question isn’t should we build it. It’s how fast we can match them.
But here’s the thing nobody says out loud: You’re not them.
Their features reflect their strategy, team, and customer base—not yours. Mimicking what they build without context just grafts someone else’s plan onto your business.
It’s not leadership. It’s panic wearing a product hat. And it never ends. Because as soon as you match that feature, they’re already on to the next one. You stay stuck playing catch-up—while they keep building from a place of clarity.
Copying isn’t a strategy
Competitor awareness is smart. But competitor worship is lazy.
When your roadmap becomes a mirror instead of a map, you’re not making strategic bets—you’re reacting. Your team stops thinking critically. Your site starts looking like everyone else’s. Your brand becomes a collage of other people’s best guesses.
You end up with a Frankenstack: bloated with underperforming features you can’t maintain, don’t optimise, and never validated. Because nobody paused to ask the harder questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- What customer behaviour are we trying to change?
- What outcome will tell us it worked?
And here’s the kicker: even when copied features ship, they rarely shift anything. Because if nobody truly believed in them—nobody tracks what happens next.
The real cost of mimicry
Let’s say you copy the feature. You release it. It works—technically.
But then?
Silence.
No follow-up. No KPIs reviewed. No user behaviour tracked. No conversation about whether it did anything beyond matching what your competitor had.
This is the hidden cost of copying: you don’t own what you build, so you don’t measure it either. There’s no conviction behind the decision—so there’s no energy behind what comes after.
And when nobody is asking what changed post-launch, the answer is usually: not much.
The feature becomes cosmetic. A checkbox ticked. It clutters the experience, adds complexity to your stack, and drifts into irrelevance—untouched until someone questions whether it should be there at all.
All that effort. No impact. Not because you executed badly—but because you never defined what success was meant to look like in the first place.
What better looks like
That’s the difference clarity makes. While copied features drift, owned features drive change.
The best teams we’ve worked with don’t have the busiest roadmaps. They have the clearest. Every feature earns its place. Every release is tied to a measurable shift—in behaviour, in conversion, in confidence.
That clarity looks like:
- Features mapped to real customer insight, not internal wishlists
- Priorities set by value, not volume
- Clear ownership: who’s accountable, what success looks like, and how we know if it worked
- The confidence to not build something, even when a competitor just did
Sometimes the most strategic move is restraint. And sometimes saying no is how you win.
Take this back to your next roadmap meeting
Before the next round of prioritisation, try asking harder questions:
- Are we building this because it fits us—or because it feels urgent?
- Will this feature create meaningful change, or just tick a box?
- If we didn’t build it, what would actually break?
- Who owns its success—and what are they responsible for tracking?
- What would we remove if we weren’t afraid to?
It’s easy to chase what others are doing. Much harder to choose what you should do—and stick to it.
The best ecommerce teams don’t chase features. They chase outcomes.
JH – The Breakthrough Agency.
At JH, we work with ambitious ecommerce teams who want to get unstuck—whether that’s through strategy, delivery, or just better alignment.
We don’t do silver bullets. We ask better questions, challenge the brief, and help teams move with purpose, especially when progress feels out of reach.
Because breakthroughs don’t come from playing it safe. They come when you stop settling for work that holds you back.
Reach out to us by sending a message on LinkedIn or email breakthrough@wearejh.com.