Look, I get it. You’re an engineer, a product developer, someone who builds things. When you hear “benchmarking,” you probably think about tearing down a competitor’s product, spreading all the components on a table, and figuring out how they solved the problem. That’s technical benchmarking, and it’s incredibly powerful.
But here’s what most technical teams miss: there’s a second type of benchmarking that’s just as critical, and it’s the bridge that helps you actually talk to marketing, sales, and most importantly, your customers.
Let me explain both, because you need them working together.
Technical benchmarking: What are they doing differently?
At Ford, we’d take exhaust systems and tear them down completely. Ours, Toyota’s, GM’s – all laid out side by side on a big board. We weren’t just comparing specs. We were asking: are they doing something different? Do they know something we don’t? Why would they choose this approach over that one?
Technical benchmarking has two roles. Firstly, it helps you understand if competitors are technologically doing something you should mirror or avoid. Secondly, and this is where it gets interesting, it helps you translate what consumers say into actual technical requirements you can measure and build against.
You can benchmark anything this way. Take a school – you could benchmark class sizes, curriculum sequences, how they handle kids with learning differences, time spent on each subject.
When we studied schools for kids with learning differences, we discovered they had a simple rule: if you don’t understand something, ask another student first, not the teacher. That one mechanism changed the entire dynamic of the room.
We learned that through benchmarking.
But here’s the problem: most companies are really good at technical benchmarking. So good, in fact, that they end up in a race against each other and literally outpace the customer.
The customer has no idea what you’re doing anymore.
Consumer benchmarking: Why do people choose what they choose?
This is where technical teams usually get uncomfortable, but stay with me because this is how you get marketing and sales speaking your language. (Or, listen to our podcast episode on the types of benchmarking).
Consumer benchmarking isn’t about finding which product customers like best. It’s not concept testing. It’s about putting people in a real context: a struggling moment they’ve actually experienced, and watching them choose.
We bring eight different products to the table, not three polished concepts. We bring a range of experiences, things that might not seem like they even compete, because we’re trying to understand what people mean when they say things.
But here’s what happens: we ask someone about a specific Jobs to be Done they were trying to get done. We lay out products on a table. We let them choose what they’ve used before in that situation. Then we unpack their language. Why did you pick this one? How did you pick it off the shelf? What about the ones you didn’t choose?
And this is the critical part for you technical folks: we bring you into these sessions because the technical measure you have doesn’t necessarily relate to what the customer means.
The translation problem
Someone says a product is “slow,” and you immediately think they want faster speed. But when you dig in, you realize the outcome they want is more output, not speed.
Someone says they “trust” one product over another. You need to unpack that – what are the characteristics that make it trustworthy? Trust is an effect, not a cause. What do you do that causes trust?
This is why consumer benchmarking matters for technical teams. You’re operating at the boundary of language. The first round of Jobs to be Done interviews helps you understand why someone switched behaviors – that’s the big hire.
But consumer benchmarking helps you understand how people use things- the little hire. When do you buy the bottle of Windex versus when do you spray it? Both give you language to understand the Job.
Why you need both
Technical benchmarking lives on the supply side – cost and performance. Consumer benchmarking lives on the demand side – price and value. But they have to connect.
The mistake I see is when technical teams try to get too concrete from consumer benchmarking. They hear feedback and immediately jump to: “In this context, the food must be this exact size.” No. You might be serving adults or kids, big dogs or small dogs. Don’t go too far.
The other mistake? When technical teams vary things to such small degrees that they have no impact. You’re measuring things customers don’t care about because you never unpacked what they actually meant.
Here’s the thing, though, customers are experts in their problem and their desired outcomes. But they have no real expertise in how to get there. They can help you understand where, when, and why. You figure out what, how, and how much.
Making it work across departments
Consumer benchmarking helps everyone, but it needs to be led right. If marketing leads it, they often don’t go deep enough to get to the underlying causal mechanisms. If technical leads it, they sometimes miss the broader language that marketing needs. This is why having an impartial third party – someone divorced from your product – is vital.
Marketing learns the words people actually use. Technical teams learn the thresholds and targets. Everyone learns the trade-offs and hire-and-fire criteria. Most importantly, you get one source of truth that every department translates from, instead of everyone using the same words with different definitions.
The homework here is simple: think about something you’ve been wanting to buy but you’re stuck on. Build a competitive set – not just direct competitors, but half-steps and alternatives. Benchmark them both ways.
From a consumer perspective: How do they fit your context? What trade-offs would you make? From a technical perspective: How is each one solving the problem differently?
Because at the end of the day, both types of benchmarking give you pieces of the answer. It’s still your job to piece them together with your customer constraints and business constraints to figure out what you can actually build.