By Teresa Torres · producttalk.org · @ttorres on X · LinkedIn
Teresa Torres ran the inaugural CDH Benchmark survey, collecting responses from 1,999 product people across 78 countries to measure how many teams have adopted continuous discovery habits and whether those habits correlate with success. She defines success across three lenses: financial impact (revenue or cost reduction), customer growth and adoption, and team and company satisfaction. Results show most products aim at revenue, but many respondents were unsure of their product's strategic role and only a minority felt on pace to hit cost goals. Product trios are fairly common, though collaboration quality varies, with many teams still struggling with equal voice and old ways of working. The piece matters because it replaces anecdote with hard numbers about how discovery practice is actually spreading.
01Key takeaways
- Measure your product's adoption and outcomes with real data rather than relying only on proxy metrics like course enrollments.
- Leaders should make sure every team understands whether its product is meant to drive revenue or reduce costs.
- Track both financial results and customer usage, since a vanity user count can hide weak engagement.
- Averages can mislead; look at the distribution of survey responses to see the real variation.
- Product trios need time and explicit processes for meeting and deciding, or quieter members won't get an equal say.
- Teaching collaboration skills alongside discovery skills is necessary, because dominant individuals and unclear ownership block team learning.
02Key sections
- Why measure adoption
- Torres explains that her goal of getting more teams to adopt continuous discovery habits was directionally right but hard to track without baseline data. She launched a survey to get hard numbers rather than relying on proxies like course enrollments.
- Who responded
- The respondent pool spanned many countries and company sizes but skewed toward product managers, a bias Torres acknowledges and plans to correct next year. Recruitment channels and incentives shaped who answered.
- Financial and adoption outcomes
- Most products were expected to generate revenue, yet a notable share were unsure of their role, exposing a strategic-context gap. Customer growth and usage data also revealed a large group lacking clear visibility into product usage.
- Satisfaction and product trios
- Company satisfaction ran higher than team collaboration satisfaction, and most respondents worked in trios with varying time together and uneven decision-making voice. Torres reads the results as evidence of progress alongside many remaining symptoms of old ways of working.
- What comes next
- Torres promises follow-up posts analyzing discovery habits such as outcome setting, interview frequency, and solution evaluation, plus tests of her hypotheses about what drives team success.
03From the post
“For years, I’ve shared that Product Talk’s outcome is to increase the number of teams who adopt the continuous discovery habits that I outlined in my book. The challenge with this outcome is that it’s hard to measure. It’s directionally correct, but without a clear sense”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.