At Nashville Software School, we provide our students and graduates who are still on the search for their first job in tech with opportunities to dive deeper and continue their education while on the job hunt. These graduates are referred to as Seekers. 

Seekers at Nashville Software School (NSS) had the pleasure of learning from Gavin Coyle in a recent meeting this spring. During his session, Gavin brought his experience and knowledge as a product leader and Agile coach at Enok Collective to share product and business concepts like product market fit and company stage. His insights were geared towards software engineers working with product managers, but are also valuable for data analysts working with business leaders in their company.

[The demand for software engineers] is not going away, you are needed. Following NSS’ story, it's a sweet model. I'm an outside observer, so I'm telling you, you've made a great choice. Though the market's tough to find a role right now, that won't always be the case.”

How Product Market Fit Can Help You Understand A Company's Stage

Understanding product market fit (PMF) can help you as an engineer or data analyst. “The more you can anticipate how your business leaders think, the more you know their jargon, how to communicate with them, how to ask questions for clarity, and how to even push back and challenge things, [the more valuable you’ll be on the team].”

PMF is the degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. It's a journey, not a destination. The market is always evolving–influenced by changes in technology, needs, and even government policy. “Understanding [product market fit] helps you think about ‘what is the business that I work in’, ‘what is it trying to do?’,” Gavin says. “Every business, if they don't know this term, it's what they're doing. We're trying to search for or capitalize on product market fit so that what we're building, whether it's a product or service, is meeting a market demand.” 

Achieving PMF involves several stages, including customer discovery, validation, customer creation, and company creation, followed by a shift from discovery to execution as a company matures. A product has reached PMF when the “business has built a scalable and sustainable business model through providing value to a customer segment’s needs.”

It is the searching of a product for the right fit in the market, and the magical moment when market demand is met by a product that meets that demand.”

Stages of a Company

Once you grasp the concept of PMF, you can start to assess companies as you’re researching and interviewing based on where they are at in their journey towards PMF. You can then use this knowledge to determine if the company is at a stage you’d enjoy working in and how many processes they may have in place. 

The stage of a company influences how much process is in place. A start up has less process and is ok with chaos as decisions are being made every day, whereas a sustained organization is looking to keep their product up and running so the cash keeps flowing and likely has lots of processes.

“There's no right and wrong. Know your temperament, know your goals,” Gavin shares. “But when you kind of sense in an interview or your own research on their website, what's the stage of a company, the stage of the company does influence how much process is in place.”

Start Stage

Startups are different from a small company. Startups may start small, but they have goals to grow, they are searching for product market fit. “If you like high pace change often, maybe a bit of chaos, maybe startups are for you,” he says. “A startup is okay with less process. It's chaos because [you] have no idea [what you’re] going to build [from day to day].”

💡 TIP FROM GAVIN: “If you're [trying] to impress a business leader, tell them that you know the definition of a startup: ‘Its sole reason is to search for product market fit’, and they're going to be tickled to death by that.” 

Scale Stage 

These are businesses who are past the startup stage and are actively growing the company. “This is where they start moving from the early market to mainstream. So [in] the growth stage, the minimum viable product (MVP) went out there [and] it hit. Now we need to find a way to actually make that thing robust and have a lot of concurrent users, whatever the scaling needs to look like for that.”

Gavin advises developers who are looking for a steadier pace at work to look into companies who have scaled. “If you're more on the end of like, ‘hey, I'm a little more introverted, I want to just kind of be given things and left alone,’ maybe a scaled organization that's kind of ‘milking the cow’ because they've got the market pinned, could be a good place for you.”

Sustain Stage

The Sustain stage occurs when the product has fully reached their market fit and they're just “milking the cow”, as Gavin says. 

“For a sustained organization that is ‘milking the cash cow’, their product just needs to keep up and running and[will] keep making the money,” Gavin explains. “They don't need to innovate a ton. They just need to keep the service level agreement up, that the uptime is there and the level of support is there, your brand stays there. You're going to have some innovating, a sustaining innovation, little features here and there to keep up with the times. If you love that, that could be great because there's a lot of safety in that and there's a lot of certainty, there's a lot of process to protect you.” 

Shift Stage 

Shift stage is what happens when the market isn't like what it was before and the company needs to move to something else by either finding a new way to make a product reach the shifting in the market, or venture outside of the shifting market to find a different market. 

“What enterprise groups will do is they may create in corporate innovation, it's a term for ‘how do I disrupt myself before a startup does’,” Gavin explains. “The company may make a team or or even spin up a startup themselves, and if it works, they would just acquire that startup as a part of their portfolio. There's all kinds of strategies.”

Understanding what stage a business is in is important to identifying the right fit for your first role as a tech professional. As Gavin highlighted, each stage offers unique challenges and caters to different work preferences. Apply these definitions and insights to your next job interview to assess your interest and preparedness for their current company stage!