The most common reason startups fail (besides running out of cash and failing to attract funding) is missing a Product-Market Fit according to CBInsights.

"Tackling problems that are interesting to solve rather than those that serve a market need was cited as the No. 2 reason for failure, noted in 35% of cases"

Read our article on Medium.

This framework will help you as a founder or product manager to guide your research efforts and avoid biased decisions via understanding the market and developing an offering that satisfies a strong demand. While Product-Market fit is a complicated and multi-layered concept (read our blog post), there is a set of essential components you must clarify to secure your business success.

The framework is designed to help you to gather, organize and understand data, summarize and illustrate the essential components of PMF — a successful product and business model from perspectives of overall Market Demand, particular Use Cases and Job Stories, your target customer profiles, pricing, and top-line Customer Acquisition / Sales and UX strategy.

Filing in all the blind spots will help to define validation steps from qualitative Customer Research programs to a Soft-Launch, as well as develop a Go-To-Market strategy and inform your Mid- & Long-term roadmaps.

Most of PMF components require dedicated research, so here we would list them:

• ‍Target Market
• Product or Service model
• Competition
• Value Proposition
• Revenue Model
• Customer Acquisition
• Customer Retention
• Success Metrics

The Product-Market fit development framework & How it works

Build a full-picture covering all the crucial aspects of your product and its palce on the market by drilling down from top-line concepts to details. This top-down approach will help you to start from creative thinking and ideation, but finish with an actionable plan. You will see how every component and concept are being developed step by step.

You can notice a HADI-like titles on the left header column. This is the core — each component goes through HADI cycle steps: Hypothesis, Action to test/validate, Insights and Action again.

We also use variations of this framework to run team product development workshops for our customers to achive these crucial goals:

• Make your team see and understand the whole picture of the business
• Increase cross-team awareness so people understand how other departments operates and find more effective vais of collaboration
• Create the culture of innovation and research-driven development
• Replace excessive research, long PDF reports and following hesitation in decision-making (we call it Analysis Paralysis) with an experimentator atitude.

ALWAYS REMEBER!

Frameworks and templates aren't a magic wand that will do all the job. Moreove, there are no one and only correct approach to thinking and doing things, whatever it be.

They serve the goal to shape the process of thinking, organize and summarize information and you will eventually come up with your own version. Be flexible, embrace creativity and set your own rules. We just hope that we will help you to kick off your own journey by sharing these templates.

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The prefilled and public version of this Miro Template is coming soon.