What a product designer should know about their market fit.

A successful product starts with a spot-on recognition of market fit. It is the foundation of a long-live  company, but it is often not executed thoroughly, or just simply.. not allocated with enough time for exploration and discussion, and learning from failures.

While a product designer could be a bit late to this process, one could still proactively try to ask the question: 

Who are we designing for? and Why will they use your product?

Or just even further:

How much confidence we have for the market fit that identified? and What methods are used, and data that had been collected beforehand?

Just by knowing where a team is standing in terms of the understanding of a market fit could gives one a sense of how you could plan your design process. Whether it is a quick proof of concept that could be experimented outside the context of your product? Or it is a in-product MVP that will entail sufficient UX and necessary features/flows? Or it is mature that one could start to plot out detailed interaction plan and get ready for a usability evaluation?

It is all fine that a product is built for an exploratory purpose. But one should do one's homework in syncing correctly with one's business phase.

To find that market fit, one could use its intuition, and regularly test with new ideas to identify the next hits. However, one could take the consequence of the careless management. For example: underestimate a potential approach, allocating too less focus to a high potentially opportunity, or a lack of correct user segmentation.

Here is a 4-step product development process that I learned in a case study:

1. Idea generation: 

Using a formal management brainstorming session to evaluate the user needs.

2. Concept screening:

Administrating formal survey to identify interest, probable using behaviors, and the willingness of engagement.

3. Product development and testing:

Development of prototype features and products and tested with smaller group. AB testing with a portion of the users.

4. Quantification of volume

Use a market research firm to estimate the potential reach and conversion (quantification).

Each company could have its own approach to find its market fit. It is possible that a product designer could advocate a systematic R&D process to one's team (of course especially when your team is small and you are part of the core stakeholders), since after all, both you and the team could benefit from a more solid understanding of market fits. As more senior one becomes, one would face a more broad and ambiguous mission, and it is when you know that a successful product is a product that'd been used and served the user well in their life, not a product with interaction that barely touch your users' needs.