Following the herd in leadership produces exactly what chasing benchmarks produces in product: average results, because you are optimizing for what others have already done rather than for what your specific situation requires.
That decision did not come from being contrarian for its own sake. It came from looking honestly at what we were actually good at and where demand was moving, rather than doing what every other struggling agency was doing. The herd in that moment was running toward the same wall.
The imitation trap
The leaders who avoid herd behavior have developed strategic thinking habits that force them to examine the first obvious answer before committing to it. The herd answer is almost always the first obvious one.
None of these moves are inherently wrong. The problem is the reasoning behind them. When you adopt a practice because someone else is doing it, you skip the question that actually matters: is this the right thing for my team, my customers, and my situation right now?
At EditMe, my co-founder and I had a version of this disagreement. The SaaS wiki market was consolidating around a few dominant players. The conventional wisdom was to follow the feature roadmap of whoever was winning. I kept pushing us to go deeper on the customer segment where we were actually winning - nonprofits and small businesses - rather than trying to match PBwiki feature for feature. We were solving a different problem for a different customer. Chasing the leader's roadmap would have meant abandoning the only ground we had.
Independent leadership judgment requires breaking out of the local maxima at the personal level — being willing to give up a comfortable position or a conventional approach when the evidence points elsewhere.
One of the more common patterns I see with senior product leaders is benchmarking as a substitute for thinking. A Head of Product will come to a session having surveyed five peers at similar companies about how they structure their planning cycles, what their roadmap tools look like, how they run performance reviews. The data is useful. But the instinct behind it is often avoidance - gathering external validation rather than making a hard call based on what is actually true in their own organization.
The head of product I coach at Capsule was doing a version of this. She was spending real energy on what other fintech product leaders were doing - org structures, prioritization frameworks, how they managed the engineering relationship. Some of it was relevant. Most of it was noise that kept her from addressing the real tension in her own situation: a CTO who was making architectural decisions without her input and a CEO who had not drawn clear ownership lines.
No benchmark was going to solve that. She had to name the specific problem in her specific company and decide what to do about it.
Finding your own path is not comfortable
Repositioning Embarc into pharma meant turning down work we knew how to do and pursuing clients we had no track record with. Going narrow with EditMe meant watching a competitor build a bigger-looking product while we built a better-fitting one. These were not confident, obvious decisions at the time. They were bets made on genuine analysis rather than imitation.
The leaders I have watched build something durable share one characteristic: they make their decisions based on what they actually know about their situation, not on what they observe someone else doing in a different situation with different constraints. They steal ideas aggressively. They do not steal strategies wholesale.
