Positioning and it's relationship with product market fit
What on earth is product market fit? How does it relate to positioning?
I’ve been thinking about product market fit a lot recently, mostly because it’s a buzzword that gets thrown around in the startup world and I live in the startup world. It’s also sort of related to positioning, though it’s not entirely clear how, at least not for most people.
The problem with product market fit
So the biggest challenge in even talking about product market fit, let alone using it to inform a business decision, is that it seems like there’s no clear metric to understand if you have it or if you don’t. When I’m reading about product market fit, there’s usually a comment about how “you’d just know” if you have it or not.
There also doesn’t seem to be a clear methodology for achieving product market fit. If there were, I suppose every startup would do it or hire that consultant, because product market fit is generally accepted as the holy grail of startup land.
I don’t think this is entirely wrong, either. Ultimately, you want to have a product that fits the needs of a market. This should be a fairly obvious observation. I just think that the way product market fit is currently discussed and conceptualized doesn’t provide a lot of actionable information other than trial and error and waiting for the lighting bolt to strike.
Where positioning comes in
I really like this description of how positioning fits into the product market fit equation. That is, that it is the “market fit” part of product market fit. So while many (perhaps most) founders focus on tweaking their product to fit the market they think they have to address, you could take the product you have and position it for a market that will love it. Even if your product kind of sucks. As April Dunford says, positioning makes a turd into fertilizer.
Changing your product is hard and it’s slow. Since there’s no clear methodology on how to adjust your product so that you get product market fit, you’re also flailing around in the dark, unsure if the features your current customers say they want are actually going to help you get any new deals closed.
If you instead change the context you’re putting around your product, ie you change the positioning, it’s much easier to see if the new positioning works (or not). It’s faster and can be tested. Even better, there’s a clear methodology you can follow to improve your positioning and there are clear symptoms of poor positioning to look out for.
Positioning and product market fit are related. From my (biased!) perspective, though, the main difference is that positioning is something that can be evaluated with metrics other than ‘you’ll just know!’ There are action steps other than trial and error to improve positioning and ways to test whether or not it’s working.
If product market fit is going to ultimately be relevant for your startup, you need to be able to define what it means, how you will know it’s been achieved and have a plan for getting there. If you can take your product, as it currently exists, and position it in a market that will love it, wouldn’t that be ideal?