Finding Market-Product Fit

Jagalchi market | Busan, South Korea

There’s a zillion articles written about product-market fit…the idea that you can find a resonance point for your product or service in some market that allows rapid growth of your business. On a Zoom call this week, I mentioned the idea of flipping that concept to put the market first - market-product fit if you will. I got lots of head nods and sparked some good conversation, so I thought it would be worth writing some of these thoughts down to share more broadly.

I can pretty distinctly remember the first time I heard this concept. The company I worked for at the time had recently been acquired, and as a result I was in seemingly endless product strategy and roadmap meetings. In those discussions, one of the VPs stated how we were going to be more market-focused.

I remember initially being pretty put off on this idea. I of course believed that we were already market focused! After all we spent tons of time thinking about who the buyer was for our solution, how it would be used by the customer, and the value that we brought them. At the time I was more focused on R&D than marketing and I was proud of the innovative products that we had built. From my perspective, our products were awesome, and selling well to the customers we were targeting. But as I quickly learned, there was a distinct advantage to being focused on the market we wanted to serve at the outset and then working to identify needs and pain points and gaps in that market. Once that was clear, we had lots of smart folks who could find ways to fill those gaps with innovative products. Market-product fit…

This is a mindset shift that many smaller technology-led companies have to make. I’ve lived through at least one, and feel that I learned a lot as a result.

My understanding of this approach to product development as market-product fit was also influenced by this excellent article by Edward Ford. In the article Edward discusses important decisions regarding the market SaaS companies can choose to serve and the impact that should have on your business model, pricing, and ultimately the product too. For example, don’t try to sell a technically complex product with a long sales cycle into small business. You’ll never close enough deals to make the economics work. Instead, start with an understanding of where you want to be selling (enterprise, mid-market, or small business) and then build a sales strategy and product that fit that plan. The same applies for the street market in the photo above…

Note: I visited Jagalchi market in 2018. I had a day to walk around the central area and beaches of Busan, soaking in the business of the city and it’s inhabitants.