As you may know, PMF isn’t about survey results, a single metric or even a qualitative study. There are many moving parts and definitely not something a researcher can tackle alone.

So what exactly is a product-market fit?

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Yes, by definition it’s partly about how your product fits into your market, but under a closer lens it is about assessing and mitigating risk. You need to ask yourself the following:

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• • Is the market already saturated with products that measure up to people’s needs?
• • Have you identified your target audience and their needs?
• • Does your product serve a distinct purpose?

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In addition to these questions, if your product helps your audience solve a problem or addresses an unmet need, people are much more likely to purchase your product or service. therefore, you will be much more successful in obtaining product-market fit.

PMF should be a shared task that sits across a company’s market researchers and product analysts all the way through to sales departments, BDMs and customer support teams.

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Putting user research to work
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The right research and insights is the first step at ensuring PMF. Start by helping your team with UX research and qualitative data.

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Get a good handle on your value proposition and identify if your audience truly understands the value your product brings and if it helps fill their needs. Using one-on-one interviews is a great way to dig deeper into this area and learn how your product resonates with your audience.
By activating quantitative user research that measures metrics like task success and time on task, you can determine how effective and efficient your product is and your audience will be more willing to purchase a product that is easy to use.

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Make the most of user personas. By building and sharing user personas you can dig deeper into insights about the people behind the user. With this understanding, features, products, and innovations will be more aligned with users’ unmet needs, helping to ensure you are solving real problems for people.
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To sum it all up, by combining these qualitative methods with product-market fit surveys, analytics data, and metrics you can get a bigger picture view of your audience's needs and how your product fits in with them. At the end of the day your product is only successful if it serves people in the right way and is easily accessible to them.