Pivoting a Product Market Fit
28 March, 2022

Co-founder and CTO at Sezzle
Dealing with Many Priorities
A few months after I joined my company, I found an issue with the prioritization within the organization. At that time, we were doing a significant amount of testing to try and find the correct product-market fit. The most priorities were listed from most important to least: increasing sales and impressions were at the top while increasing cost savings for merchants was towards the bottom.
Our company wasn’t seeing the growth we wanted to, and we kept coming back to a single data point: that users preferred credit to debit due to the rewards. We initially thought it was a preference issue but later started thinking about it in terms of accessibility. We had a unique opportunity to test our product where users would receive a certain percentage of cashback if they used it.
Experimentation with Specific Merchants
Innovation Provokes Answers:
We partnered with a few of our merchants, asking them if we could put up different installment options to test our product. Once we received the go-ahead, we implemented these changes and found that the impressions were night and day. Although we didn’t have a product yet, seeing the large increase in traffic to our platform was strong validation that we needed to pivot.
It was difficult to make the decision to shut our company down for a few months to replatform and rebuild our product. We knew that we needed to come to the market with a new strategy – so we did. Those two months were difficult, although very productive. After they passed, we launched a new product that worked with installment payments. We marketed it to our current customer base, and the company continued to grow.
Technical and People Management:
After we relaunched our product, we noticed that we nailed the product-market fit. Our job was no longer to find that, but instead, to scale it. From that point on, the job of leading the team changed around every six months.
At one point, I was developing code, managing vendors, expectations, and the people side of things. The growth, organization, and values of the team were probably the most important part of the process moving forward. I approached people management in a similar way I built a product: by testing, applying, and then iterating.
Wearing Many Hats:
As my company grows, I’ve worn many hats and performed many roles. At one point, I spent much of my time answering support tickets and conducting the accounting. When I began to grow my team, it was empowering to hand these roles off to others that were far better than I was at it. It also meant that my job broadened and narrowed at the same time, focusing on specific details while managing the larger org.
Discover Plato
Scale your coaching effort for your engineering and product teams
Develop yourself to become a stronger engineering / product leader
Related stories
5 February
As a Leader, can you show your weaknesses to your team? Your vulnerability to your team? Not only can you, you must.

Kamal Raj Guptha R
Engineering Manager at Jeavio
31 January
Discover the daily struggles, challenges, and moments of delight encountered when delivering banking products around the world. I will share my story candidly and honestly, without filter as much as I am allowed, and offer insights into my approach while providing retrospectives of the results.

Loussaief Fayssal
Director of CX at FLF PRODUCT DESIGN
20 January
As a Lead or Manager, one could naturally incline more towards being either people oriented or task oriented. Which is better? Do you know which side you lean more towards?

Kamal Raj Guptha R
Engineering Manager at Jeavio
10 December
Supporting principles on why being data led (not driven) helps with the story telling.
Vikash Chhaganlal
Head of Engineering at Xero
29 November
Why DevSecOps matter and what's really in it for you, the team and the organisation?
Vikash Chhaganlal
Head of Engineering at Xero