EQUESTRIAN STRATEGIES with Lana Antanovich
Subsidiary of Copernici Group
Challenge Your Market Fit
Market fit means that business has calculated chances for its product to enter a market segment and survive, and actually deliver a return on your investment.
Have a Market. When starting out a project we know how important it is to get out of the building, talk to prospects and figure out whether our idea holds any merit. That’s the basis of Having a Market – i.e. Customer Development and Product-to-Market fit.
Product-to-Market fit. And the goal is to get to Product-to-Market Fit, where the product is validated and built for a specific market, and there’s a specific (validated) business model. After all, you don’t just start INVESTING into building the product, launch it and then hope to heck that it works, right? But this happens a lot.
Have a Product. We (managers) don’t always get to start at Step 1 – evaluating assumptions and really thinking. In some cases there’s a functioning product, a bit of traction, but no clear direction and no scalable opportunities (at least not plainly in sight). So when this happens, what can you do?
Instinctually you may think it makes sense to keep building more features or radically change the product. But if the Product-to-Market Fit isn’t right, more features isn’t likely to solve the problem. And investing in rebuilding the technology is going to take a long time, cost a lot of money and not necessarily guarantee any additional success.
Market-to-Product fit. Instead, I recommend finding a market for the product (new technology) you have. Take the product, point it at a different market and see what happens. Rinse and repeat. For many emerged technology companies this is what they need to do because they’ve got a product but no market. Find a market. In some respects this is a slight handcuff – you’re not starting from scratch and the product can feel like “baggage” – but before throwing your product in the garbage and starting anew, it’s worth looking for a market where there is a fit. Incidentally, the same holds true for a business model. You may have a product but the wrong business model. You don’t scrap the product, you change the model. That’s very much Market-to-Product fit.
To effectively challenge your market fit you want to get hold of the 5 Steps Process of Market Fit evaluation, narrow down on Window of Opportunity, reconsider your Product Development and Customer Development approached in your company, clear up the lenses of Product Deconstruction and Market Segmentation, revisit your product Portfolio Performance. Copernici consultants will join your team to add resource power and help though the change management till your company gets to a new comfortable position.