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

When wrestling with finding Product Market fit, via a Minimum Viable Product, (MVP), I constantly find myself referring to an issue I call the Engineer’s Paradox:

Engineers want to build for adoption, that is a carefully designed system that accommodates user adoption with the requisite features and performance they require, or else they will risk losing customers. Yet, to truly understand what users want, and how they will use the system, one needs to release a “suboptimal” product in order to gain customer feedback.

So, if you release junk early, no one will ever want what you build, but if you release a fully operational system too late, it may not conform to what user’s want. So, let’s see how we can find a happy medium…
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I gave this talk last week to the members of the TiE Leadership Program, aimed at helping to frame what it takes to develop a product organization — aimed at an audience of non-product start-up execs, and existing / aspiring start-up CEOs. Take a look at the slides for the specific “tips”, but here’s a brief summary of the areas I covered, along with specific references I made to concepts, ideas, books, and people that I have learned a lot from along the way.
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As the Global E-Week site puts it: “25,000 Events, Millions of Participants, 1 Week”. Certainly an impressive initiative that we should all continue to do our part to support. Personally, I could only make it to three events in Cambridge MA which were absolutely incredible – here’s my recap of those.
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