Lisa Sy 🦋

Seeking product market fit isn’t a fine art; it’s wielding a blunt instrument to strike gold. Part of my concern about some of the more academic takes on the practice of product management are that they almost make building great products feel like an inevitability. Smart people who do smart things the right way are told: if you do this, it will work. And it’s not just frameworks or the academic side of the industry, it’s the startup lore and revisionist history that create this belief that you can pattern match how company A, B, or C did things you, too, could be as great as company A, B, or C. But I’ve been a PM. And a founder. And a director. And at the C-level. Two decades of my career dedicated to trying to build great things—by myself or through a team. And my gut (yes that second brain where all my startup trauma lives) continues to tell me: Building something 0 > 1 is about 3 simple things, and those things only: 1. Finding the right problem 2. Solving it marginally well 3. Enough so you get paid Early PMF feels so…stupid. It’s that: “wait—you’ll use this even though it barely works?” feeling. And it’s usually not about what or how exactly that thing works, but rather, #1 above: did you find the right problem? (Note: I’m putting aside market opportunity, and identifying venture scalable problems, and all that jazz and focusing exclusively on building things people want, use, and pay for.) And what I sometimes see is folks spend a lot of time on how they’ll solve the problem, to the detriment of being bold in the problem-to-be-solved side of things. I’ve been guilty of this: being so personally convinced a problem needs solving that I bang my builder head against the wrong thing, too long. Now what’s interesting imo is that as soon as you strike down with that PMF pick and oil starts to flow (what metaphor should I use here?) then you very quickly have to scaffold structured PM mechanics on maximizing and expanding the opportunity. Though I might argue: vibes and hustle mode can and should last much longer than you think. And the best of the best can do it all: - brute force problem seeking - hacky scrappy proto-building - structured, analytical product scaling - as ICs or as leaders of teams But too many folks are trained exclusively on the 2nd half of that stack, and may not have the experience to grok the difference between a cleanly solvable optimization problem and a messy PMF issue. Not only do the frameworks fail here: they mask core problems by distracting with activity. So my advice to both rising PMs and ambitious product leaders is this: Go off and build something 0 > 1 until you remember how shockingly simple PMF feels. Talk to users. Test a landing page. Ask for money. Find the problem. Your job may not give you this opportunity (building features is not going 0 > 1!)—so put down the non fiction books and go pick up some code. Tune that second brain in your tummy—not on data analysis or sensible user stories or a spreadsheet of prioritized hypotheses—but on the direct hit of building something and vulnerably asking: will you buy this? Remind yourself of how simple it can be.