Nail it before you scale it: how to think about product-market fit

May 25

Getting a product out in the market fast to test a concept, maybe with a little bit of rubber tape, or take the time to make it nice and robust, scalable from day one? I have been on this discussion over and over again and even if generalization is never a good thing, I believe that no matter what kind of phase your product is in, it is always a must to nail the product before you scale it.

Scaling comes at a cost and the most important thing as a product person is to understand if the product is worth the effort that scale requires.

Does the product solve a problem as much as we hope it does? Will anyone use it? Does it help the company reach its goals? No matter how much you believe in your ideas and hypothesis, and want to invest in a robust technical solution from the beginning, none of these questions can be answered before a real user get a real product in its hands and is willing to pay for it with its time, money or both.

As much as we all love to ship things and get it right, sometimes you have to kill your darlings and it is always better to kill your ideas really young before going through a costly operation to scale them.

But what does it actually mean to nail a product before scaling it? Here are some frameworks that I use when thinking about product-market fit and scale

Define what you want to prove and quantify it: how does success look like?

Product-market fit is measured in really different ways depending on the product. No matter what success looks like, it is always important to identify your golden metric from the beginning and make it really clear what are the numbers you need to hit before even thinking about scale. This will help you guide and align both the team and the stakeholders around it.

Some examples of success metrics can be the number of people using it (it solves a problem), people who come back repeatedly to use the product (it gives a better solution to a problem than anything else in the market), people who are willing to pay more for it (market demand), people who are recommending it (customer satisfaction). Once you have defined your most important metric, you need to prove it before scaling. If your goal is monetization, test willingness to pay on real clients, maybe with a non-binding letter of intent, if consumers usage is what is important to prove the worthiness of your product, monitor retention or if people would get upset if the product is not available anymore.

Before you hit your target on your golden metric, might it be usage, retention, number of paying customers, or customer recommendations, you do not have product-market fit and are not ready for scale.

If you missed identifying that number in the beginning, it is never too late. It happened to me more than once that something I thought was really clear in the beginning, went sideways. When it happens, it is important to stop and go back and remind oneself of the real goal before continuing investing. This leads to the other important thing to think about...

Do not mistake product-solution fit with product-market fit

The first tells you that you are on the right path, that you have found something that is worth time and investment. The second tells you that you created a solution that satisfies your customer in a good enough way and is worth thinking about scaling it.

One common mistake for product teams is to blame the simplicity of the MVP for the lack of product-solution fit. ”Customers do not buy it because we do not have THAT feature” or ”users do not come back because we have not implemented THAT extra thing” are common thoughts that build on the idea that the lack of features is the reason why people do not use the product the way we intend to.

The reality is that when it happens is often a sign of lacking product-solution fit: people do not use your product because it doesn’t solve a problem worth solving or it does in a less good way than something else existing in the market.

When you are facing this scenario, as much as it hurts, you should not invest in new features but kill your darling.

Do not think about product-market fit as a set goal to hit

When you instead have a good product-solution fit, and the metrics are starting to point in the right direction, it is important not to scale the MVP too fast.

A product-market fit is not a set goal that you hit and can forget about. More often than not it is a flexible target that moves with your users.

A product-solution fit is a sign that you should invest more in your MVP and transform it into a lovable product. Your early adopters will still love and use it, but you need to make sure to make it a product that the vast majority of the users can appreciate before scaling it up.

This is the time to prepare yourself for growth with qualitative interviews to define new features, get to the bottom of the pain points that are not solved, understand what would need to be in place for users to recommend it and invest in infrastructure. It is when product-market fit work starts evolving into growth work.

Finding product-solution fit and then product-market fit is a really critical step in product development and it is important that product people approach it with an honest mind.

It is in this phase that we might have to kill our darlings, we need therefore to make sure that we approach this phase in an unbiased way, keeping the best interest of the product and the company in mind.

There are some common paths that we might be tempted to take to give our product a chance, it is instead crucial to stay away from before we find product-market fit.

Common pre-product-market fit pitfalls that I experienced myself:

Use paid channels: you are just throwing money at the problem.

You might see some short-term effects that will make you and your stakeholders happy, but the long-term retention will flatten out. I made this mistake myself when I let the company invest in an expensive marketing campaign way before product-market fit. The download of our app went up, but not many of those customers stick in the long run, making that investment really short-sighted.

Add new features, thinking the MVP is not good enough.

I talked about this before and I think this is a really hard one to see when you are in the middle of development. It is human to not want to let go of your believes and hypothesis and keep going, but the correct way of thinking about it is product solution-fit>invest in your MVP> scale.

If you set your success metrics correctly, and you have a solution for a real problem, then you should be seeing some traction from the beginning. If that is not the case the tough question you should ask yourself is: is this really worth continuing working on?

Your product needs firstly to do one thing well, and prove that it can do it. Expanding its scope will not help you find a product-market fit.

Invest in infrastructure from the beginning.

This case happens when we are so sure of ourselves and our idea that we think that is good to start with a robust infrastructure. Or when we start from the tech-side, instead of thinking about user problems.

I think that the pitfall in this is pretty apparent: having a perfect code or a super scalable infrastructure is totally useless if nobody uses the product. Take the discussion with your engineers from the beginning, even if it might be a tough one, and agree on something that works for both sides to test your product idea. But avoid at any cost investing on infrastructure before proving market-fit, unless you are willing to take the enormous risk with it.

Finding product-market fit is not easy, and you should treat the process with honesty and respect. But when you find it, it is one of the most rewarding things a product team can achieve. It means that you solved a real problem for a user, how cool is that?!