The Overview #88: Prioritisation as negotiation, PMF fundamentals, "make something people want"

Published almost 2 years ago • 2 min read

Just build something people want

I love this phrase because it’s so often misunderstood.

The emphasis is not on “make something people want” – building a good product.

The emphasis should be on “make something people want” – understanding customer problems and delivering solutions.

Subtle, but it’s a difference.

And see any startup product manager or ‘indie maker’ influencer roll out this phrase and it’s all about the former: building a good product, fussing on the UX, thinking about the workflows, etc. And the advice on the latter part is just ‘make sure you’re solving a customer problem’. Helpful? No.

So, make something people want actually means:

Understand their day-to-day role, not just the part that concerns your product area
Understand their jobs, pains, gains, motivations, and deduce the value they desire (that they might not know themselves)
Introduce unconventional wisdom that challenges or changes their perspective
Understand their jobs-to-be-done and how they approach achieving outcomes
Understand the journey they go on to investigate and buy solutions
… and much more.

Simple, huh.

Regret minimization

I really like this framework for personal and work stuff, and it’s really relevant to my post this week about my word of the year: try.

Personally, life is for living! If you want to do something and don’t, you’ll be kicking yourself.

And at work, if you’re faced with a choice between a hard decision and an easy one, you’ve got to take the hard decision.

Prioritization = negotiation

This is so accurate. John hits the nail on the head – most prioritization frameworks are negotiation frameworks, under the guide of objectivity.

And in our WTF is Go-to-Market? course, Alicia and I teach the same thing for things like ICPs, personas, positioning, etc.

A lot of product marketing work is intangible – hypotheticals, what ifs, and broad blobs. If you can make it tangible – get assumptions on paper, start to find patterns, put some ranking towards them – you’re abstracting the emotion and strong thoughts into a more objective approach. If you didn’t, you’d still be left arguing – or, strongly negotiating – based on believes.

So, make your discussions tangible, and treat them like negotiations. You’re not aiming for objectivity – you’re testing to find the strongest bet that you can make.

Swipe File: Fundamentals of Product/Market-Fit

📚 As a free Building Momentum subscriber, you have access to my exclusive product marketing swipe file! Click here to access.

PMF gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean?

Enter this very comprehensive article – Fundamentals of Product/Market-Fit from Holloway.

Product-market fit (product-market fit or PMF) refers to the notion that there is a point at which a given market responds so positively to a company’s product that the product fits the market’s needs. A precise point at which fit has been achieved does not exist. Instead, product-market fit represents a continuum of traction that ranges from absolute clarity that a company does not have product-market fit to maybe they have product-market fit to experts disagree whether they have product-market fit all the way to it’s beyond all doubt they have product-market fit.

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