Product-Market Fit

• How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?
• What would you use as an alternative if our product was not available?
• What is the main benefit that you get from using our product
• What type of person do you think would benefit most from our product?
• What motivated you to use our product?
• Why are you using our product as opposed to other solutions?
• What makes our product a must-have product?
•  How can we improve our product to best meet your needs?

The problem-solution fit stage is when a beginning firm has a core group of satisfied and referable clients. 

Achieving a problem-solution fit entails the following:

• You’ve already created an MVP (minimum viable product),
• You’ve identified your early adopters (people to use your MVP),
• You have solved an issue that your early adopters were experiencing.
• You’ve managed to charge a reasonable price for your solution, ensuring that people are satisfied.

Product/market fit describes the extent of the issue you are attempting to address as well as the effectiveness of your product or service in resolving that problem.

The simplest approach to grasp the notion of product/market fit is to consider that if a product meets high market demand, you have achieved product/market fit.

Product-market fit is defined as follows:

• High level of satisfaction by a large set of customers,
• High retention rate and low churn rate,
• Revenue (and product) growth,
• High product usage interval

Typically, organizations will go through three stages to achieve Go To Market Fit, and it’s a poor idea to go on to the next one before reaching the prior one’s milestone:

• Founder Sales – After your founders have sold to around 30 paying clients, each with identical qualities, you will have successfully finished the Founder Sales phase.

• Professional Sales – Once at least three non-founders, most likely professional salespeople, have sold your product to numerous comparable paying clients, you will have successfully completed the Professional Sales Phase

• Scaling Phase – When you have successfully recruited and onboarded a significant group of new salespeople who are currently achieving quota, you will have completed the Scaling Sales phase and may claim Go To Market Fit. These new salespeople were not taught by witnessing the founders, but rather via a systematic training course and instruction in a well-documented sales procedure.

Product-market fit refers to a situation in which a company’s target consumers purchase, use, and tell others about the company’s firm in sufficient numbers to maintain the product’s growth and profitability. Your team cannot afford to concentrate on other crucial strategic goals like growth or upselling current customers until you have confirmed that enough individuals are prepared to pay for the product. In reality, such attempts may be unproductive if you haven’t first decided that your product has a large enough market to maintain itself and create a profit.

It all relies on your industry, specialization, and other things. Some individuals may attain product-market fit extremely fast, but on average, it takes between 24 and 36 months.

In an ideal world, your product or service will meet market demand from the start. If it does not, you must consider:

• The time it takes for you to discover you don’t have enough PMF.
• The time required to choose the appropriate market
• The amount of time required to adapt the product to the market.

All of this may happen in a single day in rare circumstances. In others, the firm goes out of business after a few years without completing step one.

The notion is often associated with marketing and product management. In fact, attaining it is a shared duty across the company. Sales, business development, support, finance, and all other departments contribute to the company’s achievement of this significant milestone.

• Line up your product goals first – To determine Product-Market Fit (PMF), you must first establish the PMF criterion. Is it a case of exponential user signups? Or rapid revenue growth? Or does it have the greatest market share? The PMF objectives must correspond to the financial milestones of your firm. The CPO will need to collaborate with the CEO to develop a plan for meeting the financial targets. Financial milestones are divided into Product Team Goals. The Product Team Goals will guide the Product Hypotheses that the Product Team will produce.

• Come up with product hypotheses – Examine your internal and external data channels to generate product hypotheses. Speak with customers, examine your product statistics, research your rivals, and consult with internal departments.Once you have a few Product Hypotheses, centralize them in one place. Having ideas in one place allows for higher-level thinking. 

• Prioritize the product hypotheses – Set up a prioritization meeting with the key members of your product team – the Tech Lead, a Designer, a Decision-Maker, and a Subject Matter Expert. Keep the prioritization meeting as small as possible. A team of 4 to 5 people is a fair size. Go through the list of Product Hypotheses and assign a projected Impact, Confidence, and Effort to each item. The impact indicates how probable it is that you will be able to meet your quarterly product targets. The level of confidence indicates how well you understand the hypothesis and how dangerous the concept is. The effort is a calculated effort based on a high-level technological solution.

• Get feedback from five customers – Before you begin constructing, get input on the product hypothesis from five consumers. Five consumers should give you a solid notion of whether or not the concept is worth pursuing. Utilize a combination of customer insights (qualitative data) and customer behaviors (quantitative data) to gain a complete picture of what people say vs what they do. This procedure might take anything from a few days to a few weeks. Expect the following scenarios:
  • The product idea has piqued the attention of more than four buyers – this is the best-case scenario.
  • Three out of five consumers are interested – this is a tiebreaker, and you should locate additional customers to talk with.
  • utilize the new information to generate new hypotheses. Reprioritize the additional hypotheses and add them to the queue.

• Make small bets with MVPs –  Product trials are frequently referred to as “MVPs,” “Prototypes,” or “Small Bets.” Regardless of semantics, the goal is to further verify theories by gathering private data. The secret sauce for determining Product-Market Fit is proprietary data. It often comprises the following observations:
  • The customer journey and your client’s distinct behavior
  • Your target market’s price sensitivity
  • Idea for a new feature in your next product iteration
  • Insider information about your product category

• Evaluate market traction – Once you’ve launched your product trial, keep an eye out for the aforementioned early signals of client traction. Keep an eye out for the traction indicators listed below:
  • Organic revenue, conversion, and engagement growth that is exponential.
  • High user retention of at least 40% of new consumers
  • At least a three-to-one return on customer acquisition expense throughout the course of your customer’s lifespan.
  • At least 40% of buyers say they would be “extremely dissatisfied” if the product is withdrawn from the market.