Product-Market Gap | Christophe Dujarric

Building a great product is not enough. The market needs to meet it halfway.

Most technical founders know their product deeply. Maintaining a clear line between what's built and what the market needs is a different skill.

The symptom

Usage is lower than expected. Retention is inconsistent. Your best customers love the product but can't explain why to others. New features ship but adoption doesn't follow. The roadmap is driven by internal conviction more than external evidence.

This isn't a product quality problem. It's a product-market alignment problem.

What's actually happening

The gap between a strong product and real market traction usually comes from one of three misalignments.

Built for a problem the market doesn't prioritize. The product solves something real, but not something urgent enough to trigger a buying decision. Customers find it useful once they're in. But they didn't feel the pain strongly enough to seek it out.

Value is real but not visible at the right moment. The product creates genuine value, but it shows up too late in the customer journey, after the decision has already been made elsewhere.

Roadmap driven by what's technically interesting, not by what's commercially critical. Technical founders naturally gravitate toward hard problems. But the next feature that matters most is rarely the hardest one to build.

What fixing it looks like

It starts with the customers who stayed and the ones who left. Not surveys. Real conversations. What made them stay? What did they use? What did they ignore? What would have made them leave sooner?

From that, you build a clearer picture of where your product creates undeniable value, and where it's still optional. That distinction drives everything: positioning, roadmap priorities, sales motion, onboarding.

The goal isn't a pivot. It's a sharper focus. Most products don't need to change what they do. They need to change who they do it for, and how they talk about it.

I've been on both sides of this. As a product leader building things people didn't buy, and as a GTM leader trying to sell things the product hadn't quite nailed yet. That double perspective is what makes the conversation useful.

You'll recognize this problem if

Usage is lower than your team expected after launch
Retention is inconsistent across customer segments
Your best customers can't explain the product to their peers
The roadmap is driven more by engineering interest than customer urgency
You're not sure which features actually drive retention