What is product-market fit and how to measure it (with examples)

This comprehensive guide explores the concept of product-market fit, emphasizing its importance for business growth and sustainability by ensuring a product meets the underserved needs of its target market. It outlines the shared responsibility among business leaders, product managers, designers, and marketing teams in achieving and maintaining product-market fit. The guide introduces Dan Olsen's Lean Product Process as a structured approach to identify target customers, understand their needs, and develop a value proposition with a minimum viable product (MVP) that can be tested and refined. It stresses the need for both quantitative metrics like acquisition and retention rates, and qualitative measures such as customer satisfaction and advocacy, to assess product-market fit. Real-world examples like Uber, Spotify, Canva, and the failure of New Coke illustrate successful and unsuccessful attempts at achieving this balance. The document concludes with best practices for pursuing product-market fit, emphasizing the importance of understanding target customers and their needs before scaling efforts.