Lean operations and how to reach product-market fit

During this year’s Seedstars Summit, the Innovation Time team had the great opportunity to attend several workshops. Through a series of articles we will share with you the best of it! Today’s article is about lean operations and how to reach the product-market fit.

“Market forces are not linear.” started Bernino Lind, speaker of the Lean Operations workshop. In other words, we cannot perfectly predict the future but we can predict that the future has a risk.

“Push yourself out of the reality distortion field and up to reality.”

The « Plan, Do, Check and Act » method

PDCA Method Cycle

What did successful companies do to achieve success? Nobody knows for sure but the question you should ask yourself is: what do people want? The “Plan, Do, Check, Act” (PDCA) method can help answer this question and prevent from making the wrong decisions. When starting a project, a start-up should first build their hypotheses (Plan), implement them (Do) and then control if they are true (Check). This control can be done by collecting data and using certain instruments to analyse it, such as Google Analytics. Pre-sales campaigns are suitable control instruments as well. If the hypotheses you set turn out to be incorrect, you get to the “Act” part of the method. You have to re-adjust and evolve in order to understand and match consumer needs. On the contrary, if your hypotheses are true, you can continue the implementation of the project. The ultimate purpose is to “push yourself out of the reality distortion field and up to reality.”

“Do not forget: done is better than perfect.”

Perfection as a goal?

What about perfection? Should it be a goal itself? Surely, you want your product to be as nice as possible but do not forget: done is better than perfect. A company should worry more about getting the product on the market and test it rather than making it perfect. Indeed, before creating the “perfect product” you want to be sure that it matches the consumer needs.

Prioritise hypotheses

Can we do it? Does it address consumer pains or gains? Did other companies already solve this problem? These are the three questions you should ask yourself before implementing a project. You can use them as a ranking tool: obviously, you would rather choose a doable, consumer-suited and new project than create a project that has been done plenty of times before.

Key takeaway

A company should follow these three rules in order to reach product-market fit:

1. Be data driven
2. Do not overdose perfection
3. Use the PDCA method in order to push your business up to reality