Product-market fit is when you have a value proposition product or service matched with a market that wants it. If loads of people are using your product and leaving you brilliant reviews then then you have product-market fit. One of the best takeaways from this podcast with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was his succinct definition of how to get product-market fit: ‘talk to your customers and make improvements on repeat’.
What if you don’t have any customers?
Then find people who are like the customers you want to have. Marty Cagan in his book Inspired describes a technique he calls a Customer Discovery Programme which creates the ‘magical power’ of reference customers. In a nutshell, it's about finding people who would be real customers and who are suffering the real issues that your product addresses. If you can’t find any people with these issues then you probably don’t have product-market fit. If you can find them, these reference customers co-create the product, really zero in on its most important features and help you get product-market fit. As a bonus the reference customers become huge advocates of your product that they helped create.
If you have customers already
Read the negative reviews. Talk to your customer service department. If someone took the effort to write a negative review or call up to complain then there’s definitely something to improve on.
1. Find the most important problem to fix
You might want to start with the highest impact and lowest effort to fix one. A good approach here is to have the team come up with and prioritise the various issues to address, with the final decision made by whoever is responsible for the product or service.
2. Get inspiration
Spend some time researching ways to fix the selected problem. This issue might already be addressed by your competitors or companies in different markets. Their solutions applied to your unique circumstances can inspire you to create something better.
3. Design options to fix the issue
Using the inspiration from part 2, sketch out what the new and improved journeys might look like. Pick the best one.
4. Build a prototype
No black and white wireframes here. This will be a high fidelity prototype that looks and feels like the real thing. Figma is a great tool to build these really quickly and can import designs you like to help get started.
5. Test it
Aim for 7 customers to test it with. 7 is the magic number! If it’s an early test cycle then you’re finding out if a customer would choose to use this i.e. does it provide them value? If you’ve already proven the value then it’s about seeing if customers can figure out how to use it.
6. Repeat
You might want to iterate parts 3 to 5 to refine it some more. Otherwise build it, measure the response and decide on the next thing to improve on.
My company Bright 7 uses these techniques as part of a structured innovation process called the Product Discovery Lab. It’s based on AJ&Smart’s Design Sprint 2.0 which is an iteration on Jake Knap’s OG Design Sprint he invented at Google Ventures.
Hope you found this interesting!
Cheers
Iain
This rabbit found product-market fit. Courtesy of Gratisography.