How do you scale and grow your product once you have achieved product market fit and differentiation?

Right fit of product for market depends on various factors like, -Understand the latent need of customer and build the product -Understand the market size and do further volume expansion -Is it price sensetive market build the optimum product with necessary features -Variant can be option by providing multiple features but that features should reduce your Opex

They say "Be so close to your customer and tell them their story before they tell you theirs." For product, it's crucial to understand and keep yourself updated as per the market sentiment, and based on that , once you already have achieved differentiation, every feature enhancement must be aligned with a long-term value proposition that is beyond those features. Diversify the target segments and build a proper customer journey through your offering.

Take Your Product from Fit to Phenomenal! ?? I'd advise: - Identify the key drivers of your product's growth. ?? - Explore new markets or customer segments for expansion. ?? - Continuously innovate and improve your product offering. ?? - Develop a clear strategy for scaling up effectively. ?? - Ensure each new customer adds revenue with minimal cost. ?? - Conduct market research to validate expansion opportunities. ?? - Prioritize product features and enhancements that matter. ? - Focus on recruiting and retaining talented team members. ?? Pro Tip: Use Analytics to track product performance and market trends! ??

Invest in growth marketing: Build a strong marketing team that can help you to reach new customers and grow your user base. Focus on channels that are effective for your target audience, such as paid advertising, content marketing, and social media marketing. Expand your sales team: If you have a direct sales team, invest in expanding it so that you can reach more customers Improve your product: Continue to invest in new product features and improvements. This will help you to keep your existing customers happy and attract new customers. Scale your infrastructure: As your user base grows, you will need to scale your infrastructure to support it Build a strong team: Hire talented people to join your team and help you to grow your business

Once you've achieved product-market fit and differentiation, scaling your product involves several key steps. First, prioritize operational efficiency by optimizing your processes and technology infrastructure to handle increased demand. Focus on customer retention through enhanced user experiences and feedback loops, while expanding customer acquisition via targeted marketing and partnerships. Invest in scaling your team, balancing growth with maintaining company culture. Monitor key metrics, adapting as necessary to market trends. Finally, explore adjacent markets or geographies, leveraging your core differentiation to expand your reach and revenue potential.

In my experience, I realized that it is crucial for Product Managers, Product architects, Solution Architects and Engineering teams to collaborate with each other understanding the product market fit and how to scale the product to meet the needs. All the topics about product performance, efficiencies , SLAs, Operational Service Agreements etc need to be defined at this stage. It is also extremely important that the product architecture ensures that foundational architecture is laid out so that multiple products can leverage the same instead of building silos and technical debt later in the game.

In order to scale the product, its important to be AGILE and reactive to the customer demand. Changes in product architecture would need a paradigm shift and this should be done when a positive trend is seen for next level. Instead of investing heavy at the beginning , keep the momentum going by rolling out incremental changes without breaking the existing functionality.

Consider incorporating a modular approach in your product architecture, emphasizing the use of microservices to enhance scalability, reliability, and maintainability. Leverage cloud services for elastic scalability during peak demand, and strategically employ APIs to facilitate seamless integrations. Prioritize collaboration with the engineering team and stakeholders to achieve a well-balanced architecture that not only meets current needs but also adapts easily to future advancements, ensuring sustained performance and efficient iteration.

Having worked with both blitzscaling, and long term gain environments. Scaling defines the civilizational aptitude of the Product. - Clear Definition of Horizontal and Vertical teams. - OKRs, SOPs - Program, Product, Project teams working hand in hand. - Revenue teams controlling the balance sheet - Leadership excelling at their budget and sponsorships - Culture teams achieving excellence at the Human costs. - Continuing the Hacker spirit from 0-1 phase in working on continuous discovery process. - Enabled Product teams with Product heads leaning on operations.

To scale and grow a mature product, one should consider diversifying our target audience, exploring new markets, enhancing features based on user feedback, investing in marketing to maintain visibility, and fostering partnerships to expand distribution channels. Continuous innovation and adapting to evolving market trends are key for sustained growth.

Hiring the best team members is as crucial as getting the right customer, investors for the product. So, invest on product culture and propagate the same in the team. Make sure that new hires understand the team dynamics and see a value add in the team.

Build in slience. It is easy to get into sales mode after achieving market fit. Founders might probably focus on increasing market budget and increase sales team by at least 2-3 times. But they will forgot expanding product team. Because it looks like an extra expense for them. However, as you get more and more customers, their demands will increase. This will result a flood of product backlog and negatives from clients. Because what they have asked isnt added for 3 months. As a result, the churn will rate will increase significantly and stakeholders end up putting lots of stress on product team for not performing good enough. If you dont want this happen to you just like me, expand your product team before it is late.

Once there is enough customer base in the market, look for expansion into allied markets or new one depending on growth strategy. Expansion into new markets would need close co-ordination with marketing, legal, engineering and security team to assess the impact of new markets on existing customer base.

Trio: Product Manager, Product Designer, Product Marketing Manager. As a Product Manager, it is one your main responsibilities to strengthen relationships. Work with Product designer to discover new solutions and opportunities. Work with Product Marketing Manager to reach different customer sigments one by one at a time. These two processes never ends as long as you want to grow. Constanly discovering and reaching out.

Post achieving product market fit, one needs to ensure to stay ahead of the curve but any random experiment should not be taken up. Clearly understanding the pain points of the user, their needs should be at the center of all the innovation and experimentation work. It is important to understand that innovation means leapfrogging, it should move your metric by a factor of 10. Everything else is business as usual.

I'd consider 2 broad ways to scale a product by innovating the product offering: (1) grow user base with the same value proposition; or (2) expand the value proposition. Both broad strategies can be explored within the existing market or into a new market. (1) Requires going after idle demand or share from competitors/alternatives. (2) Requires innovating the business model. Focusing on (2), in order to generate new ideas, I have used, in the past, product design frameworks associated with customer discovery: EDA on customer engagement and 1:1 chat with customers to understand their pain points and assess the potential of an opportunity.

After achieving product-market fit and differentiation, continuous innovation is crucial to maintain your competitive edge and meet evolving customer needs. From my experience as an AI/ML consultant, leveraging AI to personalize user experiences can drive substantial growth. Implement predictive analytics to anticipate user needs and automate routine tasks, enhancing product functionality. Additionally, investing in R&D to explore new AI capabilities can open up unique value propositions. Regularly gather customer feedback to guide your innovation roadmap, ensuring that enhancements align with market demands and continue to solve real-world problems effectively.

It is easy to get trapped inside as a Product Manager. I spent most of my time with support team, developers, stakeholders and qa. However, I forgot about what is going outside. Sometimes, priorize raising head from water and analyze your surroundings.

Changing a product vision that is already in place and known to users is not an easy task. It's crucial that changes to the product vision are not erratic and that all company members understand it, as it guides the setting and breakdown of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), influencing strategy, goals, and roadmap. When adapting the product vision due to market shifts or other factors, consider the following: The desires of solvent users. The needs of paying users. The interests/problems of people similar to your paying users. Ways to bring value to these groups. This approach will assist in crafting your sales proposition and identifying a growth point that solidifies the product vision.

It is also crucial for all Product Managers to understand the bigger eco system and not just drive their products. It requires continuous learning and connecting dots and looking for more opportunities understanding how different capabilities connect to drive the company vision. For this, I recommend networking within the organization, looking for ways to expand your product and learn about other products.

Growing and scaling the product to tune it to the market is a continual process. The markets could be dynamic, the needs can change with time, competitive differentiation may wither over time. All the great points have already been covered. Just like to add that as a technical product manager we also need to keep an eye on the user experience. And it is not just about the front-end, it is the entire customer journey and beyond. Sometimes we need to strive to graduate from a better product to a best product. And that means we need to have sensory perceptions to listen to things not heard and continually evolve the product within and outside.

Remember to consider the combined cost -- of time, focus, and resources when reviewing the suggested actions above. Lay out the priorities as part of your product roadmap and perform a sanity + strategy check.

It could be beneficial to learn the stories of products that succeeded *and* failed. fB had to rearchitect their entire backend. Other successful companies did the same. For software companies, there are now advantageous tech that deal exactly with scalability challenges. It will be important to match the tech to your actual needs. As for product design, a very clear sense of purpose and customer value is imperative. There is often an instinct to add more and more features because "a bunch of customers" want them. These need to be vetted against competitor offerings and what really drives customer growth. Consider the case of Figma as well -- they had an excellent product feedback tech and process that enabled scalable market growth.