METHODOLOGY

PMF

Product-Market Fit

The point at which the market pulls product out of you faster than you can build it. Until you feel that pull, you do not have PMF.

Last reviewed: 2026-05-24 byKevin Riedl wiki β†—

Product-Market Fit is famously hard to define and famously easy to recognise. Marc Andreessen’s heuristic still holds: you know you have it when the product is being pulled by users, the press, and the cap table all at once, and your problem is no longer how to find customers but how to keep up with them.

Pre-PMF, almost everything you do is a bet. The right org chart, the right tech stack, the right hiring plan all depend on which segment of customers actually pulls. Post-PMF, the questions become operational: scale the team, harden the stack, control the burn.

The reason this matters for engineering decisions: a pre-PMF team that over-builds for scale is wasting runway. A post-PMF team that under-builds will be eaten by its own success. Wavect engages differently across this line. Pre-PMF: ship the cheapest version that lets you learn. Post-PMF: harden, document, and start sleeping at night.

// FAQ

FAQs

FAQs

You are still convincing every customer one at a time, churn is high enough that you cannot grow on word of mouth, and your roadmap is driven by what you think users want, not by what they keep asking for. If acquisition is a slog, you are pre-PMF, no matter what the deck says.
Yes for the strategy and discovery side, no for the founder-customer obsession side. PMF is mostly a function of how relentlessly the founder talks to users. A fractional CTPO can prevent expensive technical mistakes during the search; they cannot replace the founder’s calendar.
No. Markets shift, competitors copy, regulation changes. PMF is a moment, not a moat. Companies that confuse the two stop iterating right when they should be doubling down on what made the pull happen in the first place.