
Ask HN: How do you work on your personal product/market fit - tamersalama
As of lately, I&#x27;ve been struggling with the feeling that the organization I work for doesn&#x27;t recognize what I bring to the table.<p>This can very well be attributed to a multitude of things, but from the outset it looks like a product&#x2F;market fit problem.<p>Perhaps continuously iterating on the &#x27;product&#x27; will not lead to any desirable results if I&#x27;m addressing the wrong market.<p>Any similar reflections or ways to navigate it?
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muzani
I started working at a web dev job that paid less than being a manager at KFC.
This was poor PMF - the employer assumed that someone like me was a commodity
that they could replace for a similar price, when I really just wanted to
learn.

I took a large chunk of money, sold coffee. We made good money. But in those
weeks, I got calls from former colleagues asking me to freelance, and they
were paying way better than the coffee business. This was PMF - there was
plenty of demand for Android devs in 2013.

After freelancing and failing projects for reasons out of mt control, I quit
upon realizing that there were no good entrepreneurs. The market had a huge
hole for startup leaders. I founded a startup. We got in a lot of programs
because we fulfilled the requirements of having enough potential. Also
customers actually bought our stuff, meaning we met some markets. But we
didn't fit the VC market - the VCs wanted something sexier. But our startup
had an actual value to someone and we sold it for good money.

So, I suppose you can keep chasing PMF. You might have to switch fields a lot
- an app developer for a hospital can bring more value than an app developer
on a web-first company.

Generally the best places are the ones that are making lots of money, but need
something to spend it on. It can be enterprise. It can be a consulting gig for
a failing company, or a rapidly growing startup.

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carusooneliner
You're absolutely right, the environment ('market') matters as much as what
you bring to the table ('product'). I've been in similar situations before
where I've gone from being highly regarded by one manager to being regarded as
average by the next manager. In a situation like this, it's best to change
teams. While scouting for a team, pick one that gets a lot of attention from
company leadership as they tend to focus their attention on teams with growth
prospects. A team with growth will have more room for you to shine.

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shoo
One way to think about it: your current employer may have demand for people
who can fill certain roles, in order for the business / organisation to work,
at this point in time.

From the perspective of designing how the business or organisation structures
work, it may be the case that many of the individual roles are structured so
that the organisation as a whole will succeed provided each person in each
role performs the role to at least a mediocre level of ability. If someone
does a really high quality or high efficiency job at their role, it may have a
negligible impact on the organisation as a whole, as how well that role is
performed is not a bottleneck.

What does this mean?

There's probably a bunch of different roles you could fill with your skills
and ability, but any given organisation may have no demand for those roles.

For many roles, there's a limit to how much the org is willing to spend on
someone to do it, if someone doing the role really well doesn't have a large
impact on the org.

In many orgs it may be difficult for you to argue that you could bring a lot
of value by doing different role Y that you are really good at, when there is
no demand or no perceived demand for Y and you are currently doing role X
which they need filled to at least a mediocre level of ability. Or it might be
possible that someone in management can be shown the value of what a Y role
might bring, but there might not be enough ongoing Y work, so it might make
more sense for the org to hire a temporary Y consultant instead of
promoting/switching you into the Y role.

The world is large, there are many opportunities with different organisations.
Interview and create alternative options for yourself outside the system of
the current org where you are employed.

