Thomas Schranz writes in Product / Market Fit is a Trap:

Obsessing about product/market fit is a huge waste of your time. Yes … waste of your time. There … I said it again. […]

As I said above you don’t want to focus on product/market fit. You want to focus on building a great product and on getting it into the hands of your customers.

First, let’s talk about tone. I’m pretty averse to absolute language like “it’s a trap” and “it’s a waste of time.” Things are rarely that dramatic, but I guess nuance doesn’t play very well on the internet. This is also the problem I have with proclaiming that “flat design is evil.” A good designer won’t let an aesthetic trend get in the way of affordance and visual hierarchy. A good designer will work within the constraints of a particular aesthetic to accomplish their (and their users’) goals.

But I digress. On to the substance of the post…

If you read Marc Andreeessen’s entire post on Product/Market fit, you’ll see that Thomas and Marc’s views are not in conflict at all. Marc might use slightly different language, but his definitions of product and market are very similar to what Thomas proposes above (my emphasis added):

The quality of a startup’s product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: How easy is the product to use? How feature rich is it? How fast is it? How extensible is it? How polished is it? How many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?

The size of a startup’s market is the the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product.

Marc is using VC terms, but his meaning is clear: build a great product, try to get more people to use it (or as Thomas puts it elsewhere in his post: focus on product and distribution). It is up to us as product designers and product managers to figure out how to make that happen. Jobs to be Done, Personas etc. are fantastic ways to do that. But those methods are not opposing theories of startup success, as Thomas suggests. They’re a continuation (the how) of Marc’s Product/Market fit framework.