Planning in the dark

If you are a startup or development team looking to expand into new product areas, a lot rides on finding product-market fit. Like, say, the existence of your company, or your ability to create something of value for your customers. You know, the little things.

For engineering and tech leads, trying to plan development before you have product-market fit can feel like driving in the dead of night without headlights. Even the term "product-market fit" can mean different things to different folks. For our purposes, consider it the extent to which your product meets prospective customers' needs. Maybe you have some basic competitive analysis, a high-level understanding of your users' pain points, or demographic information about your target customers, but it is not enough to give you a clear sense of direction. You are squarely in the "explore" phase of Kent Beck's 3X (explore, expand, extract) framework, evolving your idea through continual, incremental experimentation.

Being in this space can feel daunting; I know because I have been there too. In 2020, I led the team that launched project tracking at Gusto, a feature set that allows business owners to monitor their workforce costs across projects. It was an ambitious undertaking that involved a great deal of uncertainty in terms of what functionalities we were going to build and how we would release them, especially in the early planning phases.

Our experience taught us that you have to get comfortable with that discomfort. The unknowns that are part and parcel of developing a product without clear product-market fit can be demotivating for teams that are not used to it, but ambiguity is a normal part of the process. The good news is that it is possible to find your way in the dark. Continue reading: https://increment.com/planning/planning-for-product-market-fit/