Product Market Flex

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around for a long time was the concept of “product market fit” (PMF). It’s easy enough to describe: “pull in the market for your product”. And I was told many a time that if I wasn’t “feeling it” then I “didn’t have it”. But the job of a PM is to not only achieve PMF but sustain it over the life of a product as the market evolves - how are you supposed to do that when you can’t pinpoint where you stand and where you need to get to?

Then it hit me. PMF is transient, and you need to “flex” your product muscles to get into the state required to do the lifting on behalf of the customer / user. I’ll admit the weightlifting anology is a stretch (get it!), so let’s try some visuals…

The diagram above shows the evolution of a product vs the needs of the market.