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Are Planning, Forecasts and Reports Actually Products?
Product-market fit is not a milestone you reach once. It is a continuous process of listening, learning and adapting to needs that keep shifting anyway. The path there is rarely a straight line, and the most informative input is usually the negative feedback.
Fit only becomes properly visible when a clear value proposition meets a genuinely understood problem, and the audience sees the benefit so clearly that they start asking for it.
That leads to a question that has stayed with me: how far do we in controlling actually treat our own deliverables as products? Plans, forecasts, reports, analyses. How consistently do we align them to fit with our internal customers?
The comparison is uncomfortable but useful. A report nobody uses has no product-market fit. Neither does a forecast that answers a question nobody asked. And a planning process the business experiences as an obligation has an adoption problem that more granularity will not solve.
Only information that gets used has any effect. That is the difference between a deliverable that is produced and one that lands.
Perhaps the most useful question in the next planning round is not whether the numbers are right. It is who actually needs them.