The Product-Market Fit Question

Achieving product-market fit is the Holy Grail for any founder, product manager, or innovation team. When you can safely exit the product-market fit phase and scale your operations and your organization.

In Steve Blank’s client development model, this phase corresponds to the Customer Validation phase because it is where you start creating customers. Ash Maurya defines this stage as the period in which you start to get traction and recover monetizable market value. Essentially, you want the answer to the following question:

Is there a viable market for the product?

This question is important for different reasons:

• You want to know if you have built something that people want
• You want to know if the market is large enough to support the business model
• You want to know if customers are willing to pay what you expect and if your value proposition is better than those of competitors.