When it comes to product-market fit, there are various approaches one could take.
Guessing on what customers want and pushing your technology towards them is one way. However, this approach can be fraught with misses and unmet expectations.
A friend just shared with me how listening carefully to the problems of existing users has been critical in pursuits of use cases. Customers have old ways of doing things they have developed over time. Even with manual, old processes, workers have refined a way to get an output.
Thus, if you are a technology company, that can value an existing workflow and supporting it step by step with your software, hardware or tools, you can create a product-market fit readily. The use case has already been adopted by existing users. You are not creating a new workflow. You are supporting existing processes that have matured over many years.
Customers, in this case, are the designers of the use case.
You Better Be The Best of the Best
In our hyper-competitive marketplace where we have too much of everything, your solution has to be the very best to be adopted. There are simply too many options that are easy for customers to reach out to.
Furthermore, knowing what you do best becomes critical to compete, stand out and align with use cases that afford your firm the winnings of market adoption. Understanding your core competency is critical.
How do you get that clear? How can you identify your core competency?
Data is around you. Find your most delighted customers and the repeatable use case wins. Those testimonials reveal your uniqueness. Take the Culture Index Survey to find out your unique 7 work-related traits.
Also, narrow the focus. You might be great at software. Does this mean all software? What if it simply productivity software?
What do you understand about productivity? Are you better at serving enterprises or small teams? Creatives or engineers? Financial management or task management?
In the end, your core competency, however narrow, is where you springboard and look for the use cases from.
What is your core competency? Who, specifically, would benefit from working with you?
