How to ask users about product-market fit?

Source: here

Q: I'm struggling to know whether my product has Product-Market Fit. When I talk to my users, do you have any advice on what questions I should ask them to help me know if I’m on the right track?

If you can easily reach 100+ active users, consider a survey 📋

  • How would you feel if you could no longer use this product: Very Disappointed, Somewhat Disappointed, Not Disappointed?
  • Compared to other ways you do X [where X is some essential function of your product], using this product to do X is generally: Much Better, Somewhat Better, Neither better nor worse, Somewhat Worse, Much Worse?
  • The last time you did X, what product or tool did you use to do it, and why? [Leave this one open ended]

The first question is a measure of user affection for your product, the second question is a measure of relative utility, and the third is behavioral

If you can't easily survey 100+ active users, talk to 6-12 of them 🗣

Ask questions along the lines of:

  1. Walk me through the last time you did X [where X is some essential function of your product]. For each key decision you made along the way, tell me a bit about why you made those decisions.
  2. What are the different products you use to do X? What are the best and worst parts of using those products? The last time you did X using this product, why did you use it instead of something else?
  3. Why did you try this product in the first place? What were you hoping it would do for you? How well has it delivered on that hope?

There are also two questions I'd recommend you not ask 🙅‍♀️

  1. NPS (Net Promoter Score), or "How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?

    While touted as a panacea by what a former Airbnb colleague calls "the NPS Industrial Complex," both the underlying science and the practical utility of this question are debatable at best.

  2. What people want, so that you can go blindly build it

    This is why you'll rarely hear user researchers wasting energy debating the tired old tropes about how Henry Ford or Steve Jobs would never listen to research: it's just blatantly, obviously true that people sometimes don't know what they want until they see it. Asking people what they want isn't research.