Products Chasing Customers

Most products chase customers.

This is one of the reasons I don’t like Product Market Fit and prefer Customer Product Fit. I write about Customer Product Fit in my book The Founder’s Manual. Markets don’t buy products, customers do. If you create a product for market fit, you will likely end up chasing customers as a result.

Product teams create products that chase customers because they are creating these products in a vacuum without constant, intimate involvement with customers. Product teams that create products based mostly on what they know about a problem and the customer’s existence with the problem decrease the likelihood of a product’s success and increase the likelihood of a product chasing customers once Version 1 is available. This can also happen if they are assuming they know the customer processes around the problem, the customer belief of the problem, and the customers value of potential solutions to the problem.

Product teams who create products that chase customers believe they know what customers want, believe they understand the problem, and believe they know what to create. This just isn’t true. Without having customers at the table throughout the product creation process, the product teams are making decisions and creating based on shallow or incorrect assumptions about the problem, what the product should do, and how the product should do it.

Doesn’t Agile assist in overcoming this — you might ask? In theory yes, but in practicality no. Many companies that have…