Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door—if the world’s actually looking for a better mousetrap. While you and your team might be certain your new tech offering is just what the market needs and wants, your excitement and resolve won’t necessarily translate to an enthusiastic response. The success of any new product or service most strongly depends on whether it truly meets a need or demand of the target audience.
Fortunately, there are effective methods tech innovators can leverage to determine whether they’ve actually created something the market will embrace. From data-driven validation to hands-on customer engagement, there are several proven strategies that can help you assess and, if needed, refine your product with confidence. Below, industry experts from Forbes Technology Council share smart approaches for ensuring your product not only gains fast traction, but also sustains long-term success.
1. Run A Small, Focused Pilot
One strategy is to run a small, focused pilot with high-intent users. By analyzing engagement, retention and willingness to pay—plus direct feedback—you obtain a strong indicator of market fit. This approach reveals honest insights and potential champions who validate the product’s real-world value. The resulting feedback loop informs crucial refinements before scaling. – Abhijit Verekar, Avèro Advisors
2. Use The Product Internally
One strategy I recommend to any tech company is “dogfooding,” or using your product internally. At my company, we leverage our platform daily in development and regulatory processes to gain such key advantages as identifying real-world pain points, enhancing usability through hands-on interaction and demonstrating credibility by relying on our platform in a high-stakes compliance environment. – Erez Kaminski, Ketryx
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3. Test An MVP With Early Adopters
A new product should address the ideal customer’s pain points and should fill a gap in the market with its unique proposition, whether that’s in terms of value, benefits or cost. Tech companies can start by building an MVP and testing it with early adopters and innovators. This is an effective way to gather feedback and check the vibe in the market, as well as to make necessary course corrections. – Indivar Nayyar, LTIMindtree
4. Maintain A Lean Customer Feedback Loop
A lean customer feedback loop is a highly effective strategy to determine and verify product-market fit. This involves continuously receiving feedback from customers, analyzing it and using it to iteratively modify your product. This approach is effective because it enables customer-centric development, faster iteration and real-time validation of the product—it’s also cost-effective. – Sonam Kanungo, Crusoe AI
5. Leverage The ‘Love Over Like’ Metric
Use the “love over like” metric—identify a small number of users who absolutely love your product, rather than many who merely like it. This works because passionate early adopters provide actionable feedback, defend against competitors, drive organic growth and ultimately reflect whether you’ve built something people genuinely can’t live without, rather than just another adequate solution. – Lee Cage Jr., BDO
6. Amplify Your User’s Voice
At my company, we use “NDFFJ”—needs, desires, fears, frustrations, job—to validate product-market fit by engaging real customers. This approach helps us distinguish true needs from desires, ensuring our product solves real pain points. By amplifying the customer’s voice, we foster empathy-driven innovation, reduce risk and build solutions that genuinely matter—driving true success. – Devendra Goyal, Think AI
7. Tap Into ‘Prospective Hindsight’
“Prospective hindsight” is an effective strategy to determine product-market fit. The idea is to imagine the product has failed market fit and uncover potential causes of the failure up front. It helps companies uncover hidden assumptions and challenges and drives a plan for pivoting if or when needed. Its success, however, depends on execution and the team’s willingness to evaluate failure scenarios honestly. – Tanu Mutreja, HP Enterprise
8. Start With Manual Delivery
Product-market fit varies for every company. One way for a startup to determine whether its product fits the market is to start with a “concierge MVP” or a “do things that don’t scale” approach. Instead of automating the solution right away, manually provide it to the first few users. This allows direct interactions with customers, showing how they use the product and what problems it solves. – Arko C, Pipeshift
9. Focus User Interviews On Quantitative Metrics
To determine and verify product-market fit, technology companies can employ user interviews that focus on quantitative metrics. This approach involves gathering data on key indicators, such as user activation rate, retention rate, feature adoption and referral patterns. By analyzing these objective measures, companies can gain valuable insights into user engagement and product effectiveness. – Nilutpal Pegu, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc.
10. Set Up A Co-Creation Partnership
A client co-creation partnership—building a product alongside clients—ensures their needs are met. Developing a new product side by side with clients or end users provides your team instant feedback and creates the opportunity for an iterative approach, allowing you to reach the market faster with better results. – Pam Brodsack, Velera
11. Utilize Cohort Retention Analysis
A powerful tool to measure product-market fit is cohort retention analysis. Cohort retention analysis shows not only how many customers you have, but also whether they find real, lasting value in your product. Retention rate by time period (percentage of active users in each cohort after an established amount of time) and churn rate (the inverse of retention) are some key indicators of product-market fit. – Lincoln Lee, Datacurve AI
12. Offer Select Customers A Free 30-Day Subscription
Give your ideal customer a free 30-day subscription to your SaaS to kick the tires, with the proviso that you will need to receive formal feedback at the end of the 30-day subscription. They will appreciate the benefit, and you will learn from their experience (both in terms of onboarding and product fit and features). – George Stelling, Lunation Inc.
13. Track What Customers Say And Do
Design your product to track user behaviors when they log in. Correlating that data with NPS surveys to derive insights can be a very effective way to zoom in on product-market fit. It is effective because it cross-references what the customer says with what the customer does, thereby facilitating targeted follow-up strategies like A/B testing. – Unni Nambiar, Aeries Technology
14. Conduct The Sean Ellis Test
The Sean Ellis Test surveys users, asking how they’d feel if they couldn’t use the product. If 40% or more of users answer, “Very disappointed,” it indicates a good product-market fit. This method measures product value and necessity. AI-driven sentiment analysis of social media posts can complement this method, providing a comprehensive view of market sentiment. – Priya Mohan, KPMG
15. Leverage Data-Driven User Feedback Analysis And ML Models
A tech company can determine product-market fit by leveraging data-driven user feedback analysis and ML models. In the automotive industry, analyzing user interactions with vehicle features through AI can uncover patterns in customer satisfaction. This strategy provides real-time, actionable insights, enabling continuous product optimization to meet market demands and ensure long-term success. – Shakir Syed, Purdue University
16. Focus On One Clear Audience To Guide Next Steps
I’ve learned there’s nothing like focusing on one clear audience, spinning up an MVP to put in users’ hands and letting actual people guide your next steps. If every sale feels like a wrestling match, keep tweaking—because once customers can’t stop asking for more, you’ve found that sweet, unstoppable groove of product-market fit. – Shrikant Nagori, Socratic
17. Embrace The ‘Fail Fast, Learn Fast’ Approach
One powerful strategy to verify product-market fit is to embrace the “fail fast, learn fast” methodology of rapid iterations. This approach prioritizes quick validation over perfection, following a cycle of building basic features, releasing quickly, collecting feedback and iterating. Companies can efficiently validate solutions and adapt to market needs while minimizing costs. – Naveen Edapurath Vijayan, Amazon Web Services
18. Develop A Gap Analysis
Understand the gaps in the market to ensure the product you’re developing solves an issue that other competitive products cannot or do not do as well as your product. Develop a gap analysis to analyze what market value or problem your tech company or product is solving to ensure effective and efficient market growth upon launch. – Amanda Dorenberg, ArtsHouse Media Group (AMG)
19. Take A User-Centric Design Approach
Approach product development with a design that is user-centric and that’s deeply focused on real customer needs. Empathizing with users and with their journeys will ensure your product is really solving their pain points. Product-market fit will follow by default if core pain points are solved. – Ugandhar Dasi, T-Mobile US
20. Always Start By Listening To Customers
Customer interactions should begin even before the development of the MVP. If your product idea is not born from a problem you heard about during customer conversations, you’re taking a risk. Further, if you don’t have users of your product among your team, you also have a high risk of losing product-market fit at some point during the development of your product. – Stephane Donze, AODocs