Fit for Market
Where teams, products and customers come together
When you’ve lost momentum with your product, your service or your market
Giving the customer
what they want
Bringing ideas into the world, building things, managing products and services – it’s ambitious and challenging and it’s why we love what we do.
When things go well, everything’s easy. Other times, what was once such a simple idea becomes more difficult and more complicated every time a voice is added or a choice is made.
Everything feels like a compromise and it’s soul destroying. All that work for not much progress. Everyone working on whatever they think is important. Little agreement about next steps and even less commitment to taking them.
Some of the signs?
- You’ve lost momentum.
- Customers make plenty of nice noises but decisions are slow and the pipeline is thin.
- You’re not making the progress you expected and think you deserve.
- You keep adding features but customers don’t seem to notice or care.
- It doesn’t feel like everyone’s on the same team and working to the same plan.
- You don’t like where you are and you’re not sure what to do about it.
If any of that looks familiar it’s time to step back, breathe a little, and reset the dial.
You know you need to get everyone on the same page. You know you need to focus on what matters to the customer. And you know you need your whole team committed to pulling together and making progress.
Fit for Market is the customer-facing, value-delivering, market-building heart of the Layers framework.
Dealing with a single product or service, it looks at value proposition, positioning, product/service design and go-to-market strategy. It’s designed to create focus, buy-in and coherent action from the very first step.
Fit for Market
Focused on a single product or service
Something important isn’t quite clicking, you’re a little bit stuck, lost maybe, and your customers aren’t biting.
A strategic tune-up designed to get your team on the same page and making progress as you go to market.
You’ll create clarity and cohesion around your core proposition and agree a roadmap that gets everyone moving in the same direction.
- Who is the customer and what do they want?
- What defines our product?
- What value do we offer our customers?
- How should we talk about what we do?
- How will we go to market?
- What is most important right now, and what isn’t?
How this works
You’re ready to get started, or you’re thinking about it. How do we make progress?
We get together. Online at first, maybe in person too. I need to know more about you and your situation and you need to know more about me. We both have to work out if we can work together.
Commitment. In this case, commitment is a code word for paperwork. An NDA, a contract, an invoice. Normal stuff.
Homework. I’ll give you a shopping list of the materials I need – stuff I can’t read on your website that underpins what your customers see. This might take you a couple of hours to gather things together. As long as it takes for me to digest what I find.
The work. We’ll work out what’s holding you back and agree a plan that gets you making progress.
It’s a team effort. You, me, your people. Together, through a mixture of meetings, workshops, research and more homework between each session, we’ll work our way to clarity about what’s holding you back, what to do about it and how to move forward.
Let’s assume there are no easy answers. So it’s likely to be iterative, particularly around the most foundational questions of value proposition and positioning.
The ground we’ll cover. The customer facing blocks of the Layers Framework. Fit for Market focuses on a single proposition wrapped up in a single question.
How will we take this product or service to this market?
We’ll work our way to solving the How part (positioning, go-to-market) after nailing down the product and customers parts first.
Starting with market and customers then working our way through – we’ll assess options and iterate answers until choices are clear and decisions are made.
Commitment. That word again. This time it’s code for a plan that everyone’s signed up for, and a programme of accountability that ensures action. Shhh … it’s also code for sacrifice, because any plan is as much about what you won’t do as it is about what you will.
Implementation. You’ll get on with making progress in the new world, and I’ll assist with check-ins, feedback and accountability for the following two months.