Getting to product/market fit (aka the inflection point in the hockey-stick curve when a product's traction starts rapidly growing) is one of the most significant milestones for any new product.
We use 3-year goals, 90-day cycles, and 2-week sprints to get there.
The 3 year minimum success criteria goal help you visualize a ballpark destination for your idea. It should also be idea-agnostic in order to shape your idea versus the other way around.
While a 3 year goal helps define a mission and create purpose, it’s too far away to drive focus. We find that 90 days is the right amount of time for that. 90 days is long enough to take on meaningful work (test a strategy) and make measurable progress (achieve traction), while still being short enough to drive a sense of urgency.
Each 90-day cycle is:
We further break each 90-day cycle into a series of six 2-week sprints. Any grand strategy can, with a little of creativity, be broken down into smaller experiments and tested. Time-boxed sprints afford more structure and more importantly, provide for shorter feedback loops during the 90-day cycle. Sprints are where you test tactics (using experiments) that help to move your overall strategy (validation campaign) forward.
We lose the sense of time when we get into flow state. For us entrepreneurs, that’s when we’re fully immersed in our products. Weeks quickly becomes months and years.
On the other hand, time is our scarcest resource and we need to balance our exuberance for product with delivering on outcomes.
The best way to do this is by creating a forcing function — coupling tight deadlines with periodic progress reporting.
The recommended progress reporting cadence to use with your core and extended teams.