Don't try to be cooler than your competition
Trying to benchmark yourself based on competition is the most natural way to present yourself to the world. You build a product X, and then you identify competitors Y & Z. You list off a bunch of features that makes you better than Y & Z. This is good for marketing your product.
But, don't take this to your heart while building a product. Your customers should be your benchmark, not your competitors. Imagine if your competitor (e-commerce) gave their customers a feature to filter by color. Now you want to outdo your competition and you decide to give your customers a feature to filter by a combination of colors (like a dress with red and blue). Now you are better than your competition. You have better features than them, and your marketing team decides to start promoting this new improvement. This is an easy decision to pass through, as everyone in your company wants to be better than competition. The clueless Manager agrees as he cannot risk sticking out his neck to say "NO", because everyone is excited about being "cooler than competition" and beating them to pulp.
Here are the 3 scenarios that could happen. Scenario 1 - Your customers can be overjoyed and decide to flock to your website, just because you have better "color filters". Your traffic starts to pick up and you are on your growth trajectory again. But, you most probably will also be in Alice's Wonderland. So coming to the other Scenario 2 - no one notices it. There is no change in the final conversion. Now you realize that people think only in a single color. No one thinks about a combination of "red and black". They only think about a "red dress" or a "black dress". The few who do think in combinations are too few and far in between. The final Scenario 3 could be even worse. Now since you started highlighting an unnecessary feature, people have started abandoning your site.
All this because, you decided to beat your competition and not to improve your customer experience. You cannot be competitor-centric in your approach. You always have to back your decision from actual customers. Or at-least based on your understanding of your customers.
Always remember - "It is good to know what your competition is doing, but even better if you know what your customers are doing."