Imagine you're running a lemonade stand. You sell five cups a day. The kid across the street? He’s moving 20. You think your lemonade tastes better, but maybe his stand looks cooler, or maybe he gives out stickers. The point is, you won’t know how you stack up until you compare. That’s benchmarking in a nutshell.

In the SaaS world, knowing how your product performs against competitors is crucial. Product benchmarking gives you a structured way to evaluate performance against industry standards and identify areas for improvement.

As a company that helps teams streamline onboarding, we’ve seen firsthand how a solid benchmarking process leads to continuous improvement in activation, adoption, and customer satisfaction. So let's talk about benchmarking. 

What Is Product Benchmarking?

Product benchmarking is the act of comparing your product’s key metrics with a recognized benchmark. This could be your own past performance, a competitor’s offering, or broader industry benchmarks. The benchmarking process helps you make better decisions, align teams around strategic goals, and drive measurable improvement.

You might run internal benchmarking to compare this quarter’s onboarding flow with last quarter’s. Or you could do external benchmarking to see how your onboarding stacks up against best-in-class SaaS products.

Overall, benchmarking allows you to spot areas for improvement, or assure you that your key metrics are going in the right direction. 

Why Product Benchmarking Matters

Let’s say your onboarding completion rate is 42%. How does that stack up? Without a benchmark to compare against, your metric is just a number. 42% might be great. Or it might be terrible considering the industry you're in. Even more established metrics like the net promoter score may need context. 

Benchmarking shows whether you’re meeting—or missing—industry standards related to your domain. It tells you if your onboarding flow is efficient or if customer satisfaction is dipping more than it should. 

Overall, product benchmarking helps you to:

• Identify performance gaps before they impact customer retention
• Establish KPIs that align with business goals and user success
• Highlight weak spots in functionality or UX
• Prioritize product enhancements for continuous improvement

Common Product Benchmarking Metrics

The first step in the benchmarking process is deciding which metrics to measure. For your benchmarking efforts to be worth it, you need reliable metrics that reflect real user behavior, not vanity stats.

So here are the high priority metrics every product team should track:

Activation Rate
A key metric that tracks how many users reach a meaningful “aha” moment. Low activation highlights areas for improvement in onboarding or value communication.

Time to Value (TTV)
Measures how fast users achieve their first success. A long time to value suggests friction and reveals areas for improvement in early user experience.

Feature Adoption
This metric shows which features users engage with. Low adoption of core features may reflect mismatched preferences, confusing UX, or missing onboarding support.

Onboarding Completion Rate
A benchmark for how many users finish the onboarding flow. A low rate signals clear areas for improvement in guidance, clarity, or engagement.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A competitive benchmark for customer satisfaction and loyalty. A low net promoter score often reflects usability issues or gaps in user experience.

Stickiness
Measured as daily active users divided by monthly active users, this metric shows how often users return. High stickiness suggests your product aligns well with user preferences and habits.

How to Run a Benchmarking Process

So now that we've covered what benchmarking is, why it's important, and what KPIs and metrics can make a good benchmark, let's actually get down to the details. 

Here are seven simple steps to product benchmarking. 

1. Set your goal
Are you aiming to improve onboarding, boost feature adoption, or reduce churn? Clarify the outcome you want so you can focus your benchmarking process on meaningful improvement.

2. Choose the right metrics
Pick KPIs that reflect real user success. Activation rate, onboarding completion, net promoter score, stickiness, and time to value are strong starting points. Select metrics that reflect your product’s unique functionality.

3. Define your benchmark
Decide what you're comparing against. Internal benchmarking helps track your progress over time, while external benchmarking lets you measure performance against competitive products or industry standards.

4. Collect reliable data
Use tools like Userflow to track user behavior and product usage. Good benchmarking starts with clean, accurate data you can trust and leverage for decision-making.

5. Analyze performance gaps
Look for discrepancies between your metrics and your benchmark. Is a feature underused? Are users stalling in onboarding? These are areas for improvement and opportunities to enhance functionality.

6. Take action and iterate
Leverage your findings to improve UX, simplify flows, and clarify value. Small changes based on real metrics can lead to big gains in performance.

7. Repeat regularly
Benchmarking should be part of your continuous improvement cycle. Review benchmarks quarterly to stay sharp, relevant, and competitive.

Why Onboarding Belongs in Your Benchmarking Playbook

When people think of benchmarking, they picture dashboards, charts, and KPIs—maybe even a few eye-glazing spreadsheets. But if you’re building a SaaS product, there’s one high-impact area you shouldn’t overlook: onboarding.

That first user journey isn’t just about getting set up—it’s where users decide if your product is worth sticking with. A great onboarding flow boosts activation, improves stickiness, and drives customer satisfaction. A confusing one? That’s churn waiting to happen.

That’s where benchmarking comes in. It helps you turn onboarding from a one-time project into an ongoing performance engine.

Here’s how onboarding and benchmarking goes hand in hand:

• Track onboarding metrics like time to value, feature adoption, and completion rate
  
  
• Benchmark against past releases, cohorts, or competitive standards
  
  
• Spot friction points and drop-offs—your clearest areas for improvement
  
  
• A/B test flows to learn what aligns with user preferences
  
  
• Evaluate how well key functionality is being adopted
  
  
• Measure stickiness before and after changes to see real impact
  
  
• Set realistic, data-backed goals for activation, retention, and yes, even onboarding-related kitting if your product setup is modular
  
  

The best product teams treat onboarding as a strategic layer, not just a warm welcome. They’re constantly comparing experiences, refining in-app flows, and using data to drive better outcomes.

So if you’re serious about benchmarking, don’t leave onboarding out of the picture. 

Benchmark Your Way to Success

Benchmarking isn’t just for enterprise teams or data scientists—it’s for any product leader who wants a clear, honest answer to: “How are we really doing?”

By comparing your product’s performance over time or against industry standards, you bring forward real areas for improvement, whether it’s tightening your onboarding, raising your Net Promoter Score, or improving stickiness and feature adoption.

And when you combine benchmarking with an onboarding tool like Userflow, you don’t just uncover problems. You’re now equipped to solve them. From insights to action, you have everything you need to build a smoother, smarter, more competitive product.

Looking to stay competitive and continuously improve? Start benchmarking smarter with Userflow.