So much has been written about product-market fit and for good reason – it’s a paradigm shift from just building a great product to understanding what the market wants and building a product accordingly.

If you are a PM with a mature product or a founder just trying to launch  one – you should care deeply about finding product-market fit. It’ll save so much time and heartbreak down the road if you focus on an idea that is actually worth pursuing. 

Instead of dumping a list of links to all the great Product-Market Fit explainer posts, I’m providing you with a curated list of resources that cover 99% of the material you need to know. 

1. Learn what Product-Market Fit is and how you can achieve it by reading Dan Olsen’s Lean Product Playbook (5 hours read). 

Dan’s experience spans product management, UX design, and marketing across a variety of products like Facebook, Box, and Hightail. I found the book really insightful, but if you don’t have time on your hands just skim through the summary instead (4 min read).

What stuck

‘It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your idea is. It’s about whether anyone is eager to pay for it.’ 

Takeaways

  • Start with the market (problem space), then the product (solution space). Not the other way around. 
  • First, define the problem space by identifying your target customers and understanding their biggest pain points. 
  • Secondly, try to craft a solution by formulating your value proposition that will distinguish you among the competition and creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) 
  • As soon as you get an MVP start testing it with customers to validate/invalidate your hypotheses and shape your product according to the feedback you get. 

2. Up your research game with Gif Constable’s ‘Talking to Humans’ (1.5 hours read).

Defining your market (the problem space) means doing at least 40 interviews. The book teaches you how to structure and conduct effective interviews and synthesize your learning.  Gif included the content of this book into the Lean Launchpad curriculum, which he taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, and other universities around the world.

What stuck

‘Here’s what customer discovery is not: It is not pitching. A natural tendency is to try to sell other people on your idea, but your job in customer discovery is to learn.’ 

Takeaways

  • Getting out of the building and talking to people is hard because they might not understand or care about your product. But that’s exactly the point!
  • Interviews are for learning about customers’ problems and the ways in which they are trying to deal with those problems. Interviews are not sales pitches. If you ask customers ‘Would you buy this product?’, they will tell you what you want to hear. Unfortunately, you need to treat those answers with a great deal of skepticism. 
  • We all have biases, but during interviews it’s important to be conscious of them. Prepare upfront a list of open-ended questions and do not lead the customer to your conclusion.
  • Interviews will not give you statistically significant data, but they will give you insights based on patterns. You don’t want to overweigh one conversation only because it validates your assumptions.

3. Fine-tune your understanding of Product- Market Fit with Brian Balfour’ s article (6 min read). 

It helps you focus on the things that are usually misunderstood and overlooked. Brian has co-founded for companies, two of which have been acquired and was VP of Growth at Hubspot. Currently he’s running Reforge, an online product management school.

What stuck

‘The point here is when you have strong Market Product Fit, it feels like the market is pulling you forward vs you pushing something on the market. ’ 

Takeaways

  • In practice, the search for market product fit is a cycle. Start with a market, build an initial version of the product, look at who actually gets value from the product, then redefine the market and redefine the product. 
  • Brian introduces two more elements into the solution space: time to value and stickiness. Time To Value is how quickly customers could experience value. Stickiness refers to natural retention mechanisms built in the product.
  • Market-Product Fit is not binary – it’s a spectrum of weak to strong. It’s also not a single point in time. That’s why you never stop improving it and measuring the results.
  • To understand if you have Market-Product Fit, combine qualitative and quantitative indicators. Brian recommends using Net Promoter Score (NPS) in combination with retention curves (you want those flat retention curves) and direct traffic.

4. Incorporate Product-Market Fit learnings into your backlog after reading Rahul Vohra’s article (9 min read).

You measured Product-Market fit and it wasn’t great. Well, how do you use the information at hand to improve your product? If you’re confused, Rahul’s article comes highly recommended. He’s the CEO of Superhuman, an exclusive email client that aims to provide the fastest experience.

What stuck

‘Politely disregard those who would not be disappointed without your product. They are so far from loving you that they are essentially a lost cause. ’ 

Takeaways

  • Sean Ellis’ Product-Market fit survey is introduced. Rahul shortens it to 4 questions, the main one being “how would you feel if you could no longer use our product?”. Companies that struggled to find growth almost always had less than 40% of users respond “very disappointed,”
  • Segment **users according to how much they think they need your product. Use the “very disappointed” group of survey respondents as a lens to narrow the market — and you may even uncover different markets where your product resonates very strongly.
  • Don’t be afraid to ignore some customers’ answers and to  tailor your product to a smaller target market. You can’t please everyone!
  • Create a detailed profile of the High-eXpecting-Customer –  someone who will enjoy your product for its greatest benefit. HXC needs to be a person who others aspire to emulate.
  • Build your roadmap by doubling down on what your ‘very disappointed’ users love. Focus the other half of your roadmap on gaining ground with the ‘somewhat disappointed’ users with whom your main benefit resonates.