“Product-market fit is never a given. Even when I’ve worked with established brands, we were still chasing PMF.”
Martyn Reding
For any product lead, the Holy Grail of product development is alignment with market needs; also known as product-market fit (PMF). But how do you get there with a new product? Especially when you’re starting from scratch with just an idea, a sharpie, and a bunch of blank post-it notes?
The answer is to understand exactly what you’re building, who for, and why – an activity known as ‘product discovery’. But the journey from idea to PMF is rarely a straight line.
Martyn Reding, one-time Head of Product Design at property website Zoopla (previously having worked with BBC, Penguin, Virgin Atlantic, Ikea, and Microsoft), and product lead at customer retention platform startup Upzelo from day one, described such a journey to Product Unleashed. This is no optimistic textbook example. It’s based on a real story of passion and enthusiasm, false steps and blind alleys, and (spoiler) ultimate success.
First, let’s get clear about our terms
“PMF is never a given. Even when I’ve worked with established brands, we were still chasing PMF.”
–Martyn Reding
Product-market fit – This describes a product that is satisfying market demand to an extent that sustains growth and profitability. Signs of PMF include target users buying and using the product, and acting as product advocates making word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations.
Product discovery – This is a process of research, data-gathering, analysis and validation to better understand user needs and demands. Insights and understanding gained through product discovery are fed into the development process to ideally create a product that uniquely meets those needs and demands.
On with the journey…
1. Capture the idea – getting past the blank page
Once you have your brilliant (!) product idea, the first step is to flesh it out, explore it, and ensure it’s not just a vanity project but something with real market and commercial potential. As Martyn put it: “Start from a position of making sure that the thing we want to do isn’t just a case of building cool tech because we’re excited about it, it’s ensuring that what we’re doing is actually solving some kind of problem.”
Armed with the kernel of the product idea, Martyn led the startup team through three key activities…
First up was an empathy mapping exercise, designed to cross-reference user jobs, pains and gains with the product’s potential services, pain relievers and gain creators. This enabled the team to zoom in on what the user (and market) might want, and also highlighted some immediate gaps which would inform the direction of development.
Equally important at this early stage was building the team. A key teambuilding activity (while still product-focused) was a ‘pre-mortem’ exercise. This involved imagining the worst-case future product scenario and using that as a lens to anticipate risks and complexities (and the team’s fears) and then lay out some initial mitigation measures.
Finally, the empathy results were poured into a simple opportunity canvas to create a summary of the known product factors, including user problems, opportunities, key metrics, unique value proposition, unfair advantage, audience & characteristics, complexities & risks, revenue streams. In Martyn’s words, “This became our shorthand, this became the way we would articulate the product. This became our ‘agreement’ for what we were building.”
2. Testing the assumptions – searching for product-market fit
With the idea taking shape, it was time to talk to potential product users to verify that the identified pain points, needs, etc. existed widely enough in reality to justify proceeding – the first steps towards product-market fit.
No smart technology or cunning marketing can avoid the fact that without PMF, the product would fail.
The team created a wide range of user profiles, oriented to job roles rather than ‘people types’, aiming to draw out the commercial niche for the product.
The result? After a programme of user interviews with a range of friends and network contacts, using a question script to ensure focused feedback, the team found that the problem they were looking to solve either just didn’t exist. Or at least was not enough of a pain point that people would pay for a product to solve it.
Still, the team were convinced they were onto something – maybe it was a question of coming at it from a different angle…
3. Time to reframe – setting a new direction
Martyn and the startup founder got together and put the product idea through its paces, asking as many ‘what-if’ questions as possible:
What if … we take X away?
… Y was different?
… Z wasn’t true?
What emerged was that while the demand for the product in the UK was insufficient, in the US there was more interest, more of a need, more demand. Interesting. What also became clear was the need to break the product idea down. They therefore decided to shift to a suite of products – smaller, individual services under the same umbrella – allowing users more flexibility and freedom to buy/use what they needed without having to commit to what they didn’t.
4. Concept testing – still searching for product-market fit
Time to go back round the loop and test again.
This time, the user interviews went wider than the team’s own networks, covering multiple sectors across multiple countries. To really get to know the potential user base, questions dug into:
- The tech they used
- Team structures
- Reporting lines
- Job titles & role remits
- Special terminology in use, etc.
Interviewees were presented with a clickable prototype and dummy product landing pages. With these tangible assets, the questions could more easily explore the perceived value:
- Would the product(s) change their work?
- Who did they think it was aimed at?
- Why did they think someone would make this?
- How much did they think it would cost? etc.
However, people still weren’t getting it.
This was a tough time for the team. In Martyn’s words? “Was this ever going to work? We were trying to balance moving fast and learning with doing the right steps and making sure we had something we could believe in. We had a lot of momentum, a lot of enthusiasm, but success felt a long way off.”
5. Defining the MVP – getting to market
The team were still committed but they needed to find a way to break through to their potential market. They renewed their focus, getting back to basics and the core of the product by working with a content designer to create a succinct definition of the product and its value.
They took the one element that was consistent throughout and crafted a proposition based on that, using this simple template:
Product name helps primary audience verb and verb object so they can verb adverb.
Success! By boiling everything down to the essentials, research and engagement with potential users became more positive and rewarding – people understood the product and the intention behind it. From this point, things moved fast.
The proposition statement became the lens through which everything was filtered. The next round of concept testing was not only a more positive and encouraging experience, people started to suggest ideas for new features, people began asking to sign up…
Similarly, the team now had a better understanding of their target audience, breaking it down into primary, secondary and tertiary users, identifying different sectors and key players.
The result? A well-rounded, solid set of (research-based) product principles.
It had been an uphill journey at times but the research had paid off and the value of continuous product discovery established. Next would come product design, a private beta version, and live testing.
“Discovery work remains important to us, whether product discovery, design discovery, tech discovery – all the timelines we are working on include an amount of discovery work.”
–Martyn Reding
The Product Discovery Zig Zag – key takeaways
The journey for Martyn and the team went from no proposition, no product, no brand, and no team to a clear strategy, a beta product, identity assets, and a committed team of eight.
And Martyn is very clear on the learning from the whole experience:
- Always defer to the core proposition – the intention, the aim, the value you’re trying to achieve, it all links through this.
- Test assumptions at every stage – never assume, always test.
- Relentlessly focus on product-market fit – ultimately, this is the goal of product discovery
“Ultimately, to my mind, that’s what discovery is for – it’s there to inform decisions, to colour your conversations, to inform your designs, to help you achieve product-market fit, to stop your product and your venture from becoming one of those that fails along the way.”
Martyn Reding