What to do when you don’t have strong product-market fit

“We have PMF!”

Awesome — but stay alert. Product-market fit is not a static point in time. It’s not a yes/no answer; it evolves, fluctuates, and changes.

Continuous growth and learning are essential for both the business and its product. By staying up-to-date with technological advancements, market dynamics, and customer feedback, a company can iterate and innovate to stay ahead of the curve. This process allows a business to refine its value proposition and strengthen its position in the market.

A lack of strong product-market fit often indicates underlying issues such as lack of alignment around vision, direction, and an inadequate understanding of customer values. Vision is critical in providing direction and purpose for a product, while alignment ensures that all stakeholders work cohesively towards shared objectives.

But this is all stuff we know — or at least we should do. Instead, I want to focus on a few other key problem areas that often are a symptom of that lack of vision. These problems often take a bit longer to solve, as they require extensive cross-team collaboration and understanding of customer values. Once the team has aligned around the vision, it’s time to take the next step.

Let’s explore.

Lack of feature adoption

A lack of feature adoption is always tricky to diagnose. There are a multitude of issues that could be contributing to the problem, but a few key areas to start looking are:

Poor user experience

If a product’s features are difficult to understand or use, users may be hesitant to adopt them. Complicated user interfaces, confusing workflows, or a lack of intuitive design can hinder feature adoption.

I once worked on a product that had ZERO in the way of a logical UX/UI. The product lead admitted that things were put together in the order they were built, not taking into consideration discoverability or experience. Absolutely bonkers, I know.

User flows have to be created in order to understand how the UI should be put together in order to allow discoverability of features as they contribute to the user experience. I…