Achieving Product / Market Fit

“The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit” 
Marc Andreesen

Make a product that nobody wants and it doesn’t matter how great your marketing is or how masterful your sales people are – it is doomed to fail. Yet there are countless examples of organisations making new, innovative and sometimes great products (on the face of it) that fail miserably - because nobody actually wants them. The idea of Product/Market Fit is about being in a good market with a product that can actually satisfy that market.

It doesn’t matter how good the team you’ve got is. It doesn’t even matter how amazing the product is. The best team, with the very best product is still doomed to fail if you don’t have the market. Having a good product is of course important, as is having a great team but it’s not as critical as having a product that solves a defined need.

How do you achieve Product/Market Fit? Marc Andreesen would say you need to do whatever is required, “including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required”. In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur discusses his “customer development process”, to sit alongside the product development process. Blank’s concept is based on understanding your customers’ problems and needs, and tweaking your products as necessary to address these demands. He recommends that a business should ‘pivot’, so they should change during the development process based on customer data and real evidence.

Interestingly, at online retailer Amazon, before any new product can be developed, it’s company policy that the product manager submits a press release for that product to their reporting manager - before the team starts developing it.  Why do Amazon insist on this? Quite simple – it’s to force their team to think about why the product should be developed in the first place, what’s special about it and who the market is for it.

Sean Ellis, author of The Lean Startup, says that the best way to get Product/Market Fit is to create a Minimum Viable Product, which I’ve discussed in a blog of its own HERE.