Here’s what I learned about product/market fit in our most recent roundtable

What an amazing roundtable! On 23rd of April, we hosted a roundtable with product leaders from top payment organizations at Piazza Italiana in Bank. Alongside enjoying delicious Italian cuisine in a stunning setting, we had the opportunity to hear how some of the most sophisticated businesses establish product/market fit within their payment organizations.

I learned loads. But here are my top three takeaways:

If you want to drive P/M fit globally you should start by thinking about org design

“Don’t build product market fit, build a machine which makes product market fit” – that’s the first key takeaway from the payments product/market fit roundtable. If you want to launch across multiple markets and territories you need to start by thinking about org design, because it lowers the burden of additional data you would need by incorporating appreciation of locality and deeper product expertise into the organization to start with. Some great techniques include:

• Deliberately international or distributed teams
• Teams with diverse backgrounds, e.g. specifically hiring immigrants
• Local offices where possible
• (In some cases, the easiest thing is acquisition! Launching in a new market is very very hard)

The next thing you need to do is to communicate and manage risk effectively 

The second challenge with product/market fit is to set expectations effectively across the organization and carefully define the level of risk investment. Investors and managers don’t like risk. And while there’s lots of amazing examples of enlightened leadership styles with a higher-than-normal appetite for risk, patiently waiting for P/M fit before making commercial assumptions, the uncertainty around this early product stage can build frustration on all sides.

• This is partly about resources. Get clear with your commercial team what kind of acquisition investment this particular product or feature justifies.
• Bring the commercial team into it and let them share the burden of discovery and market assessment.
• If something is very risky and not a huge investment, there is often no need to report it upward until it is at a maturer stage
• Bundle risk together into digestible blocks 
• Communicate on your confidence levels, possible return, and recoverable and irrecoverable investment in addition to your actions on every product gamble! 
• Don’t be fooled – remember that the work needs to have a commercial return and you are responsible for increasing revenue. 
  
  

Getting the data is the key bottleneck in product/market fit

• Build an assumption framework which showcases the importance of individual data sets to a case for action. E.g. ask “if this wasn’t true would it mean we wouldn’t go ahead?” Examine in some detail the precepts of the argument. This will help you to drive the right precepts to test. 
• In some cases, businesses will act in ways which are irrational; e.g. confirmation bias data to support the desire of head office. In these cases, try to limit damage using the above methodology. 
• Use data variety. Talking to customers, A/B testing, complaints data, user panels, crowdtesting. No data tool is perfect and all of them contain bias. 
• Where possible, the best data is a live product; but this requires that you understand the resources involved in getting the product to market in the first place
• Often data is about scale. Where you don’t have the scale or reach to achieve the data you’re looking for, crowdtesting could be one solution for you.

Crowdtesting can help you get actionable and robust feedback at scale

Global App Testing helps payments organizations to succeed with testing.

• Preciser targeting. We can help you to get away from the problems associated with friends and colleague card testing by providing a supply of professionals to deliver tests on your chosen payment instruments and niches, and to find the exact payment instrument.
• Drive product/market fit at greater scale and speed. We help to deliver speed and scale in achieving product/market fit for larger software organizations by providing rapid turnaround imprint of whether something works in a market they struggle to otherwise reach.