Why Chasing Benchmarks Will Kill Your Innovation

Let me tell you how I lost six months of growth by following “industry standards.”

We were revamping our onboarding at a marketplace I helped scale. I asked the team to research what competitors were doing. They did. We built a beautiful, well-structured, perfectly average signup flow.

Conversion rates stayed flat. Retention didn't budge. It was a total flop.

Why? Because our users weren’t “industry users.” They were our users. The ones we worked so hard to acquire. The ones confused by things our competitors never had to deal with. The ones who didn't fit the fiction we crafted when we copied someone else's idea.

It’s not that benchmarks are evil. It’s that they’re too often an excuse to avoid thinking deeply.

The Illusion of Safety

Benchmarking feels safe. That’s the trap.

You tell yourself, “This company does it this way, and they’re a market leader - so it must be right.” But reality check: they don’t know your customers. They’ve made different tradeoffs. They’re solving different problems.

When you're chasing SaaS onboarding patterns for your marketplace, or copying a retail DTC playbook for your subscription model, you're squeezing a triangle into a circle just because someone else made that triangle look polished on TechCrunch.

Too many execs focus on what “similar” companies are doing instead of figuring out what their own customers are telling them.

I call this “cargo cult strategy” - you build the sticks and towers and runways that look like a working product, but no planes ever land.

Benchmarks Are Lagging Indicators, Not Roadmaps

Let’s say your closest competitor announces they doubled user retention with a snazzy new feature set. Great. By the time you even try to catch up, they’re already onto the next thing.

Believing their growth drivers = your growth drivers is a fast way to waste resources. And chasing their feature sets means you’re building for their customer archetype, not yours.

What works instead? Anchoring your decisions in direct experience: talking to users, studying behavior, and running small, fast experiments that actually help you learn something. That’s how Tripadvisor went from $0 to $200MM in ecommerce revenue.

It wasn’t by copying Booking.com and then calling it a day. It was by throwing 100 experiments at the wall, watching what stuck, and systematizing success.

Your Real Advantage: Know Your Freaking Customer

Here’s a direct question: when’s the last time someone on your team talked to a customer?

Not read a report. Not ran a dashboard. Actually spoke with a real human being who uses or tried to use your product.

Customer intimacy is your unfair advantage. It's hard to copy, slow to build, but worth more than all the strategic planning offsites combined.

Take Ubiqi Health’s story. They didn’t stand out by mimicking other chronic care apps. They stood out by leaning hard into the actual struggles of real patients navigating messy, emotional care journeys - and building quietly powerful features that got them to trust.

You find these insights not by reading Gartner slides - by listening to pain, patterns, and behavior.

What does that look like?

• Weekly user calls with product leaders, not just researchers
• Reviewing session recordings and support chats with the whole team
• Tracking surprising friction, not just smooth funnels
• Asking, “What was confusing or annoying?” instead of “How was your experience on a scale of 1 to 10?”

That feedback? That’s the gold. Everything else is noise.

Stop Looking Sideways - Look Forward

The best companies don’t win because they followed the pack. They win because they saw the game differently.

1. Amazon wasn’t focused on what Borders was doing.
2. Airbnb didn’t obsess over Marriott’s average room pricing.

They solved new problems. They created new demand.

If you're stuck in the comparison loop, you're reinforcing a worldview where differentiation is incremental. But breakout value happens when you focus on solving a job better than anyone else - not on matching someone else’s features line for line.

This is where product risk strategy matters. Learn what your customers actually want, what they struggle with, and what they can't get from anyone else.

Then build that.

Benchmarks Can Inform, But Never Lead

Alright, here’s the nuance: I’m not saying ignore data on what others are doing. There's a difference between being informed and being steered.

Industry norms can give you a sense of direction - just don’t ask them to drive.

Want to get smarter about churn? Look at model patterns. But then pressure-test them against your own engagement curve.

Thinking about a pricing change? Sure, scan similar models. Then go talk to 10 power users and ask what they’d pay and why.

It’s the same reason I built a framework for pirate metrics - to help people stop guessing, start measuring, and make moves based on what actually matters for growth.

Benchmarks are mile markers. You’re still driving the damn car.

Here’s a breakdown of good vs. bad uses of benchmarks in product strategy:

How I Coach Execs to Break the Industry Obsession

When I work with product and marketing leaders stuck in the “industry echo chamber,” we usually do a reset.

• First, kill the PowerPoint decks.
• Second, get them in front of customers (real ones - not friendly ones).
• Third, define aggressive but learnable hypotheses. Not "let's build X" but "what behavior would prove if X is even valuable?"
  

Execs I’ve coached often show up saying, “We need a TikTok strategy.” I push back: “Do your customers even use TikTok?” Nine times out of ten, they haven’t done the work to know.

This is where having a strong product team structure helps - so you can decentralize decision-making, keep teams close to the user, and move fast without C-level bottlenecks.

It also means developing the confidence to say: “We’re not going to do what everyone else is doing right now, because we believe our insight is stronger.” That takes guts. That’s where leadership has to show up.

TL;DR: Make Your Own Map

Look, benchmarks aren’t a bad place to start. But they’re a terrible place to end up.

If you want to build something remarkable - something customers pay for, talk about, and come back to - you can’t just “do what others are doing but slightly better.”

You have to do what matters. What solves.

What works for the actual people using your stuff.

So here’s the takeaway: stop rubbernecking the competition. Start listening to your users. Run scrappy tests. Learn fast. Have a spine. Make your own damn map.

Thanks for reading - and if you want to go deeper, check out this no-BS post on breaking out of the local maxima. It’s time to stop kissing the industry playbook and start writing your own.