Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and Product-Market Fit
If you’ve ever read the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you might have found the section on urgent and important tasks to be helpful.
The book is great because it helps you eliminate Quadrant 4 – the time waster quadrant. These are things that you should just eliminate from your life – sometimes it’s easier said than done.
Quadrant 1, what’s urgent and important, often called the ‘firefight’ or ‘panic’ items is a staple of organizations all over – we all hate this quadrant as it is too often associated with resource constraint. A fancy phrase for not having enough time and resources to get it done. It comes up all too often in organizations when building Products. You get some results back after a product update, the numbers come in and they’re not what we expected. A firefight comes up and we’re forced to take resources away from other quadrants, namely quadrant 2.
Product Market Fit divides the world between Product and Market. Both things are very important but it’s not all urgent work.
Many of the tasks inside of both product and marketing efforts can be divided up into three quadrants.
After reviewing and quantifying the thoughts of 74 product-market fit experts,well over 1 million words, organized into 3 Scorecards, you start the paint the picture of what is in quadrant 1 versus quadrant 2 in better yet you learn how to prevent yourself from falling into quadrant one when not necessary.
The things that are urgent and important fall into quadrant 1 items. These items include product development and innovation. While Innovation is not part of the Product Market Fit pyramid it is part of my software and methodology to getting the business to achieve Product-Market Fit.
Things that are not urgent but important are understanding the Market and resource allocation. Having discernment about the customer and understanding why they buy and how they make decisions when using your product fall under quadrant 2. These are things that can be planned for and with enough thought, they get done in an organized manner. If these quadrant 2 items are organized and allocated properly, fewer items fall into Quadrant 1.
Quadrant 3 is part of the organization’s structure, process, and how it achieves product-market fit as well. These are items such as UX and MVP have many elements that can be planned for and delegated to others to complete.
Without having any ability to do resource allocation and prioritize what’s important, businesses often place too many resources in the wrong quadrants. In my personal opinion, too many projects fall into different quadrants because of egos and corporate bias. You can learn a lot from this book as well as learn a lot from Product-Market Fit thinking. It’s no surprise that both of these efforts, 7 habits, and Product-Market Fit link back to resource allocation.