My thoughts on finding product-market fit (2) - Gaining Clarity
Before ROQ, I always found myself arriving late to the party. It's the standard PM story - you get hired by a company to lead product development for an established market with existing users, tons of requests, and a flood of demands from sales, marketing, or customer success.
At ROQ, the story was different. The nature of pre-PMF (Product-Market Fit) startups is 180 degrees different. Most of the time, you don't know who the users will be, which market you'll target precisely, or what pains and needs your product will address.
It was challenging for me, but I learned a lot. In this post, I want to highlight three key learnings:
As a pre-PMF product manager, be ready to:
?? Challenge 1: Navigate in extreme uncertainty - optimize for learning.
In the early stages of product development, the "fog of war" covers everything:
You have two choices:
Every RTS nerd will tell you the second choice is the way to go. The point is to use this tactic in your product management all the time. Optimize for learning new things about your users, their needs, and your market. How to learn? Talk to people. Anyone who's tried your product is an interview candidate, as are those you've pitched the idea to. Prototype using pen and paper, get feedback, and ask them to pay for it and how much. Do this weekly to build the muscle for discovery.
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??? Challenge 2: Try ANYTHING to acquire users.
If your idea to get people using your product sounds stupid or cringy, that's good. Try it. Be like a scout selling cookies, even if your product isn't relevant to most people. I tried various methods to acquire users, often feeling embarrassed, but the feedback was 100 better than my assumptions made while sitting at my desk writing specs. What I tried: conferences, meetups in Berlin, Reddit groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, quora, slack communities, discord servers, friends of friends.?
?? Challenge 3: Throw away your 3-month roadmap.
Don't make long-term plans; stay tactical. Things change weekly. Instead of wasting time on lengthy roadmaps, focus on learning and acquiring users. In the pre-PMF phase, expect to pivot a lot. Three-month roadmaps for pivots are useless. Optimize for speed and cutting corners.
By the way, I'm sharing insights based on my experience building products in the dev tools / SaaS market. Your experience might differ, but I believe there are universal commonalities for any pre-PMF company.
Today's post is a bit lengthy—thanks for reading!
In the next post, I'll discuss onboarding complex SaaS products: what I learned, what worked, and what failed.
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