What is Product-Market fit?

The term product market fit was coined by the famous investor Marc Andreesen. He stated, "Product market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market."

Business owners typically call a product market fit when products fulfil the needs of a target audience. In other words, the product aims to solve a customer's pain point. So, to make your product market fit, you must prioritise its MVP before it goes to market.

The idea behind achieving product market fitness is:

• To leverage knowledge to build disruptive products
• To address customer pain points
• To exceed customer expectations

For example, companies like Slack and Netflix have invested a lot of capital and resources over the years to achieve the right product-market fit — each of them has changed its business model to suit customers' needs and meet the dynamically changing landscape.

There are five main components for defining a product market fit. These are as follows:

• Identification of the target customer
• Understanding the customer's underserved needs
• Figuring out the product's value proposition
• What are the feature sets of the product
• The overall UX of the product and the ease of use offered to the customer

Importance of Product-Market fit for Product Managers

It's easy to build a product, but it's not easy to make a product suited to meet the needs of most of your target audience. Creating a product without ensuring prospects and customers will be ready to pay becomes a counter-productive exercise. It leads to a waste of resources, making it all the more important for businesses to focus on why people will buy what they sell.

Product managers are vital to every company since they are the primary advocates of a product's unique selling point. They can envision the lifecycle of the product and what the product's success over the long run will appear to be. They use this knowledge to create a strong product strategy by working closely with other divisions in the company, such as the marketing, sales, engineering, and design teams, to help bring that vision to fruition.

Product managers use a mix of storytelling, empathy, data-driven insights, discovery and validation, and an understanding of customer expectations to remain relevant.

For product managers, it becomes essential to focus on the product constantly - the results it drives, the problems it addresses, and the amount customers are willing to pay. If these aspects are taken care of, achieving a product-market fit becomes a win-win situation for the business and its customers. Customers end up getting what they pay for, and this leads to higher conversions for the company.

By conducting a product market fit, product managers become aware of the following -

• What additional features should the product include to become customer-ready?
• Which audience is more likely to integrate the product into their lives and why?
• How can you grab consumer attention and get your target audience to purchase your product?
• How can you convert your target audience into a brand advocate for your product?
• How can your product improve customer retention?

The Pros of a Product Market Fit Analysis in the market

One of the main aspects of a business is product management. Product management involves overseeing a product's lifecycle - from the birthing stage until its end. It helps diversify the product's features and allows the product to adapt to a changing business landscape. It is centred around perfecting the overall customer experience. Looking for a product market fit means finding the right solutions to the correct problems; product managers must keep up with industry trends and market demands to ensure that the business is in line with the current ecosystem.

Understanding product market fit helps determine the way a business works in a large-scale environment and the impact it has on its target audience. Professionals who can gauge product-market fit help create a lean and value-driven enterprise. The pros of conducting a product market fit exercise are as follows -

• Development of strong insights on navigating the overall product innovation process from the idea to the commercial application stage.
• Creation of strategies that allow managers to be innovative with the product management process.
• Creation of product portfolios that help understand the product vis-a-vis market standards.
• Understanding the market to comprehend how the product can function and what its uses are.

How Does Conducting a Product-Market fitness analysis help a business?

Undertaking a product-market fit exercise or analysis is useful in today's dynamic world where the customer is king. Product market fit exercises help managers understand the indicators of innovation opportunities. Entrepreneurs get a chance to understand what they need to be mindful and critical of when designing the product and how one can foster marketplace innovation. Exploring the themes of product market fit strategies allow entrepreneurs to innovate and establish a competitive market edge for themselves and their business. Undertaking a product market fit analysis also helps entrepreneurs and product managers increase the possibility of success in their business plans and teaches them how to use resources efficiently.

The heart of any business model lies in developing a market-fit product; from understanding customer segments to value propositions, the one thing that every product manager needs to take control of is how the product or service is positioned in the market. Globally, the product-market fit has become the norm; more and more professionals are eager to succeed in their business models - either on a business or a corporate level.

Ways One Can Improve Their Product By Studying Product Market Fit

Learning how to achieve product-market fit opens up several avenues in terms of product ownership, management and analysis. It is imperative and critical to the overall success of a product. It teaches managers and entrepreneurs to collaborate optimally, and cater to their responsibilities towards the product and the market it is created for more holistically.

Conclusion

Today's world is home to a dynamic marketplace where every business and brand is motivated to make its products and services stand out. To find the sweet spot and distinguish your offering as a product or service owner, you need to find the right product-market fit - in other words, pinpoint your ideal customers and create an offering that solves their problems - and it only helps in gaining experience in the space and by enrolling for popm certification that will cover all aspects of product market fit. StarAgile is one of the leading institute that provides SAFe POPM certification.