Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: Finding Product / Market Fit is the key for early stage products. The PMF Matrix is a framework to help you get there. E-mail. Tweet.
[UPDATE: This post was updated on July 5, 2010 with new slides]

This presentation centers on the concept of Product / Market Fit: what it is, why it’s important, and how to achieve it. I propose my “Product Market Fit Matrix” that helps to characterize the issues of the start-up and presents various frameworks that can help guide development. In a sense the Product / Market Fit Matrix is a meta-framework, which can be used to characterize your current situation, so that you can employ the right set of tools to achieve your goals.

I originally developed these slides to facilitate a discussion of entrepreneurial MIT alums, mainly from the MIT Sloan business school. My intention was to introduce many of the newer, leaner concepts of early stage start-up development, since MIT tends to see a lot of “technology-in-search-of-a-problem” start-ups, in their early stages.

After receiving a very positive reception, and lots of suggestions from many smart people, I’ve updated this presentation. The presentation below was developed for a talk called “The New Rules of Product Development” for MassChallenge.
See the presentation

I’m continually fascinated at how good product design & development can come down to basic psychology. I’ve previously written about how to use Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory for product design by understanding consumer decision biases. However, customers and developers alike can fall in to the same “decision traps”, as my friend and former business partner Professor J. Edward Russo, would put it.

Here we’ll look at some of these common decision traps, and how they can become roadblocks to qualitative customer research, on the road to finding product/market fit.
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