An overview of benchmarking

Benchmarking, often mistaken for a repetitive buzzword, is crucial for cultivating a culture of continuous discovery, especially for product managers aiming to align business decisions with user needs. While discovery should be an ongoing process, benchmarking is typically a periodic activity, often reactive, used to close performance gaps, such as understanding client loss to competitors. By integrating benchmarking into continuous discovery, product managers can employ it as a series of short, tactical evaluations rather than isolated events. Benchmarking can be divided into three main types: value, operational, and go-to-market (GTM) benchmarks, each offering unique insights into feature effectiveness, operational practices, and market strategies. Effective benchmarking involves connecting with industry communities, diversifying targets beyond one's immediate environment, engaging team members, and carefully documenting findings to avoid blindly following trends that may undermine the product's value proposition. Embracing benchmarking as a routine practice allows product managers to enhance their strategic impact beyond merely managing backlogs, driving product evolution, and ensuring alignment with user expectations.