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Achieving Product-Market Fit
Gannon Hall - Sept, 2019
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GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY
What does it mean?
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What is a GTM Strategy?
A go-to-market strategy specifies how a company will reach customers,
commercialize its offering, and achieve market-leading status.
The purpose of a GTM strategy is to provide a blueprint for delivering a product or service to
the end user or business buyer, taking into account such factors as target user(s), pricing,
geography, distribution, logistics, and sales and marketing tactics.
Determining Product-Market Fit is a vital first step towards a
successful GTM strategy

Product-Market Fit Pyramid
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Start with defining the market, not the product
1. Identify Target Customer
2. Enumerate Unmet Needs
3. Define Value Prop
4. Identify Key Features
5. Develop & Test User Experience

MARKET
Defining our users and their needs
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Focus
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“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.
But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred
other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually
as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.
Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
- Steve Jobs

Define One Persona
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The only path to success is a focused and sequential market strategy;
In trying to be everything to everyone, you become nothing to no one
➔ Focus more resources on meeting fewer needs
➔ Increased velocity towards product-market fit
With rare exception, every great company began with one product
aimed to meet the needs of one user type

Identifying User Problems & Needs
➔ Quantitative data analysis
➔ Qualitative surveys & user studies
➔ Market research
➔ Informal discussions
➔ Heuristics (intuition based on prior experience)

Identify Underserved Needs
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Consider user needs along two dimensions:
1. Unmet Needs: Customer needs that aren’t
adequately met by current solutions
2. Unrealized Needs: Rather than seek to improve
upon what already exists, identify needs that
users don’t know they have
Identify the specific needs that correspond to the market opportunity

➔ Delivers what users want
➔ Iterative improvements
➔ Mitigates risk
➔ User Data analysis
➔ Opportunities easy to spot
➔ Slow and steady growth
User Inspired
Addressing user needs as they express them is core to
any post-launch product strategy - but its value is limited
to existing models users know and understand
Technology Inspired
Uncovering latent user needs by disregarding “table
stakes” and focusing on problems through the creative
lens of technological possibilities
Meeting Unmet User Needs Meeting Unrealized User Needs
➔ Solves a latent problem
➔ Greenfield bets
➔ High risk, high reward
➔ Disregards status quo
➔ Requires fresh thinking
➔ Creates new markets
Unmet and Unrealized Needs

PRODUCT
Value, Features, and User Experience
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Define the Value Proposition
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➔ What: the product/service you are building
➔ Who: the user with a significant need for the product
➔ How: the business model employed to deliver the
product; the marketing strategy used to drive growth

Define the Value Proposition
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Ask yourself 3 questions:
1. How will your product address customer needs better than
any alternative?
2. Out of all the potential customer needs your product could
address, which ones matter most?
3. Which will have the biggest impact and take the least amount
of time and effort to produce?

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Value, Service & Convenience
3 tenets to a differentiated market position
VALUE
Delivering more value
than any competitive
solution
SERVICE
CX as a first principle;
establish user trust
CONVENIENCE
personalization,
subscriptions, easy
returns, fast shipping, etc.

Ideate Potential Solution Hypotheses
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➔ Now that the value you intend to deliver has been defined (the “what”), you
need to specify how to deliver that value as quickly and simply as possible
(the “how)
➔ This is when you move from the “problem space” to the “solution space”
➔ There may be one or several potential hypotheses to be validated
➔ An ideation document should be created for each solution to be evaluated
➔ One should practice non-attachment to these ideas; think of them as
theories that can only be proven through research and/or experimentation

Exploration & Discovery
Group Discussion
Collaborative Refinement
TEST
INVALIDATE
VALIDATE
SOLUTION IDEATION
REJECT
ITERATE
FEATURE BRIEF
CONSENSUS
Solution Hypothesis
Solution Ideation & Validating Basic Assumptions

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Problems, Not Solutions
➔ Grow attached to user problems rather than potential solutions
➔ Allows PMs to assess potential solutions with scientific
objectivity
➔ Stimulates innovative thinking

The Scientific Method
1. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS: A modern understanding of best practices and
winning approaches is presupposed (ideation exercises)
2. SOLUTION HYPOTHESIS: A proposed solution to a user need or problem
based on information inputs
3. INFORMATION INPUTS: Includes existing data and observable user
behavior, user feedback, intuitive hunches, or the results of related
studies or competitive products
4. DATA INPUTS: Quantifiable measurements and observations subjected to
systematized statistical scrutiny
5. DISPROVEN HYPOTHESIS: A disproven solution hypothesis is often the
result of incorrect assumptions about user motivation and behavior
6. ITERATIONS AND IMPROVEMENT: Technology and user needs are
constantly evolving; a solution that serves those needs must also evolve
Validating Solution Hypotheses

Define the Product MVP (minimum viable product) Feature Set
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➔ Now that the value you intend to deliver has been defined (the “why”), and
a solution has been identified (the “what”), you need to specify how to
deliver that value as quickly and simply as possible (the “how)
➔ This means saying no to a myriad of great ideas and having the evidence
to establish confidence and relative priority that the features we intend
to deliver have a high probability of providing significant user value.
➔ Understand you development capacity (e.g., number of design &
engineering hours per week)
➔ Use RICE scoring to prioritize features
➔ What falls “below the line” of our capacity planning become “fast
follows” to our MVP

Prioritization with RICE Scores (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort)
Determine relative priority among various features.
Unlike most effort/value-based prioritization techniques, RICE takes
confidence into account.
RICE Score = (Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort
➔ Reach: # users impacted
➔ Impact (per user multiplier): 3x, 2x, 1x, 0x
➔ Confidence (of the estimates for reach, impact, and effort): High = 100%,
Medium = 80%, Low = 50%, Very Low = 20%
➔ Effort: person weeks (inclusive of engineering, product, design, and
stakeholders)

Feature Brief
➔ Prerequisite to a proposed solution’s acceptance and prioritization
in a feature roadmap
➔ Articulates the problem and proposed solution in a way that anyone
can understand, including non-technical stakeholders and teams
➔ Determines viability by testing assumptions prior to writing
production code, increasing the probability of success
➔ The canonical source of truth for a feature, includes references to
all other assets and artifacts related to the project
➔ Serves as the exit criteria for entering the design phase (technical
and visual)

Prototype
➔ No matter how much research we’ve done, we simply do not know how
our product will be received until people are actually using it (or not).
➔ To mitigate risk, create a functional, but non-production ready
prototype so we can, as quickly as possible, get a facsimile of the
product in front of real users.
➔ Prototypes have varying degrees of fidelity, from paper diagrams, to
interactive walkthroughs, to manufactured devices; start with the
simplest way to convey the core product thesis to real users
➔ Conduct focus groups, consumer surveys and other means of gather
user feedback
➔ Focus entirely on the user experience and functional capabilities, as
experienced by the user.

GO-TO-MARKET
Start Small & Iterate
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Product Launch
➔ Assuming that we received valuable feedback from our
prototype testing and have the confidence that our MVP will
work, it’s time to build the actual product
➔ Provide pre-release access to a small number of qualified
users, and just like with the prototype, instrument the product
and provide channels for qualitative feedback
➔ Keep iterating with this group until you’re confident that you’re
ready to go broad and launch the product with the necessary
marketing and communications muscle to get the word out

Impact Analysis
➔ About 30 days after shipping your MVP, do a deep and
objective analysis of the impact. What’s working? what’s not?
what features should you add or lose? The answers to these
questions constitute your roadmap and the iterations to come
➔ After analyzing the customer feedback, you may want to
revise your hypothesis based on what you’ve learned and loop
back to an earlier step in the process
➔ You may conclude that in order to achieve higher levels of
product-market fit you need to pivot (change one or more of
our major hypotheses).

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Summary
1. PERSONA 2. NEEDS 3. VALUE PROP 2. VALIDATION
3. LAUNCH 4. ANALYZE 5. ITERATE

THANKS
Gannon Hall
Blackstar Consulting
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