Quick and Actionable Checklist for Evaluating Produt Market Fit

`The steps for measuring PMF and driving actionable insights from it below. I've deployed variations of this methodology for years to great success, and credit to Rahul Vohra for articulating a lot of this in the linked article, read that to get a deeper explanation of the process.

 

Here are 6 steps you can take right now to better understand where your product's strengths truly stand.

 

We'll start with the 6 steps, then break each of them down into a bit more detail. 

 

1. Segment your customers.

2. Identify which customers you want to survey

3. Create and send the survey to ask customers about their experience with your product

4. Analyze responses by the segments you defined in step 1

5. Triangulate what matters to your best customers

6. Use what you found to define your Ideal Customer Profile

 

If you're ready to take action, better understand your customers, and start figuring this out, check out the more details checklist below to understand the play-by-play for this project.

 

1. Segment your customers at the account and individual levels:

   1. At the account level:

      1. By size

      2. By industry

      3. By the customers they serve

      4. By the problem they solve for their customers

      5. Any other dimensions that are applicable to your service

   2. At the individual level, focus on personas.

2. Identify which customers and personas you want to survey to get a representative sample.

3. Create a survey to ask customers

4. How would you feel if you could no longer use [our product]? (Options below)

   1. Very disappointed, Somewhat disappointed, Not Disappointed

5. What type of people do you think would most benefit from [our product]?

6. What is the main benefit you receive from [our product]?

7. How can we improve [our product] for you?

8. Analyze the repsonses by segment

   1. You'll find some segments have higher and lower shares of their respondents who say they would or would not be very disappointed

9. Once you have analyzed, triangulate the following factors for your segment with the highest share who answered "very disappointed"

   1. Which segment was it with the highest rate of respondents saying they would be very disappointed?

   2. What was the share of "very disappointed" responses?

   3. What are the most common benefits they realize from your product?

   4. What are the most common improvements they suggested?

   5. What type of people did they suggest would benefit from your product?

   6. If the share of this group is over 40%, congrats, you've found your market! If it is not, then focus on refining your product for this group and try to get so over 40% of respondents that match the profile of this group do respond with "very disappointed"

   7. If your best is between 20% and 40% "very disappointed" then you have moderate fit and should focus on what that group wants

10. Use your new findings to define your Ideal Customer Profile and improve your ability to find those fantastic customers who will gladly pay you, remain loyal, and rave about your product to their friends and colleagues! 

 

While there are steps you can take with your "moderate fit" customers, for brevity's sake we will leave this list here. If you want to have a discussion around how to take action on this PMF scoring methodology, reach out using the form below and we can set up a time to talk through your needs and see if the fit is there for us to help.