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Claire Butler: preference

7 Sept 2023 Lenny's Podcast An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)

“One of the quotes I always like to say, and I say this now too, when we're doing stuff, because we're launching new products [inaudible 00:23:40] and it comes up a lot, is you can't optimize your way to product market fit.”

— Claire Butler

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Speaker
Claire Butler
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
preference
Recorded
7 Sept 2023
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…That story of the potential customer pulling the laptop from Dylan is such a good metaphor for product market fit, which people describe as you feel pull. Someone's literally pulling it from your hands. You talked about metrics that you maybe could share. What could you share there? At these early days, especially with bottoms-up and with all these things... And people ask me all the time, "How do you measure things in an early stage situation?" And I maybe have a controversial point of view here. I don't think you can, from a metrics side. Your numbers are so small. One of the quotes I always like to say, and I say this now too, when we're doing stuff, because we're launching new products [inaudible 00:23:40] and it comes up a lot, is you can't optimize your way to product market fit. I don't care at the early stages if something's optimized by 5% from an email. That doesn't fundamentally tell me if something's working or not, so I think metrics are really hard and signal is actually way more important. Can you get a couple people who love it, not a slight improvement of a conversion of a landing page. And so I think that metrics are really hard in that way. They can help you, but when the numbers are so small, you have to, again, trust yourself a lot more and have more intuition, but then also find more signal of the things that are working, whether it's anecdotal, talking to people, examples, and that becomes much more useful than hard metrics are sometimes. I'm working on a post around product market fit and a step-by-step somewhat of our guide to help people down this path. The way you described it is the way I'm thinking about it, is step one, get one company to use your product.…

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