Product Market Fit

Every company needs to overcome lack of product/market fit.

Johny Fiala

Summary

When you start a new product, the key product/market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead.

Most nonobvious opportunities arise from a change in the market that the incumbents aren’t willing or able to adapt to.

The only way to truly prove product/market fit is to get the product into the hands of real users. But entrepreneurs can and should do their research, and try to design their business model to maximize their chances of achieving product/market fit as quickly as possible.

You used your Company Synopsis section to cover why your new product delivers crazy value to your customers by breaking down the ways that it benefits your customers and meets a highly specific need for them. Now it’s time to use your Product or How it Works section to get into the finer details around the mechanics of how it does so. This might sound like they’re one and the same. Not exactly. And here’s a good way to distinguish this.

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Let’s say you were building a subscription box service for pet flea treatment. In your Company Synopsis section, you’d probably spend your time talking about how your solution conveniently spares pet owners the hassle of remembering to make a vet appointment, traveling to the clinic, and waiting to talk with the vet just to pick up Scrambles’ medication. In your How it Works section, on the other hand, you’d shift your focus to describing how your customers have the ability to choose from a variety of brand name medications, set their own delivery schedule, enjoy 2-day delivery, and gain real-time support 24/7 from a team of industry experts.

Key questions to consider:

What are some of your product’s key features?

How will customers actually use your product or service?

Is there any technology underlying your solution you will need to explain in order for readers to fully understand what your company does and how it works?

If your product or service has some sort of proprietary element or patent at the core of what makes it work, you might be a bit hesitant to show your hand for fear that someone might run off with your idea. While this is a completely understandable concern, know that this pretty much never happens.

That being said, you can still give your readers a clear idea of how your product or service works by explaining it through the lens of how it relates to the problems that your customers face without giving up your secret sauce. Put another way, you don’t have to explicitly tell your readers the precise source code to your new app, but you will want to call attention to all of the great things it makes possible for your customers.

Product strategy.

Start by making sure you have clearly defined your strategy by setting product vision, goals, and initiatives for each product. Since major initiatives drive your goals, you should also link these together.

When this step is complete, you will be able to see the relationships between your product lines, products, goals, initiatives, and releases all on one screen. This helps you find “orphan” goals or initiatives that can be linked to high-level objectives."

Choose which releases to highlight across products and product lines.

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Decide which releases to add to your visual product roadmap. For customer views, you can show the theme of the release and key features about which they will be interested. Internal stakeholders will want to understand the strategic importance which is conveyed through goals and initiatives."

Select which features to highlight.

Roadmap

Your roadmap should be customized based on who will be viewing it. You can choose whether to present your “internal” or “external” data depending on your audience. The external release date can be different if you do not want to share your internal release dates. It can also be rounded to a broader timeframe to be less precise (e.g. show releases by quarter). To further illustrate how each highlighted feature delivers specific functions or customer requests, you can show default and custom fields. This allows your audience to see a custom view that is relevant to their business objectives."

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Bring releases and features together for a unified view.

Summary

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