PSF: Ask If It Is Worth Doing

Use three PSF gates—specific pain, economics, and feasibility—to reject work that only looks valuable.

Product-market fit asks whether a product has a market. In FDE work, the unit is problem-solution fit, or PSF: is this specific customer problem worth solving, and can this team solve it?

After reading, you should be able to answer:

• How can PSF reject work that is technically possible but not worth doing?
• Why is willingness to pay stronger evidence than a customer saying “we want it”?
• How can the first field visit reveal whether a project will become a bottomless pit?

Gate one: specific pain

“Improve support efficiency” is a direction, not a pain. “The support lead spends three hours every Monday combining escalations from four systems instead of analyzing their causes” is a pain. A good problem is visible in the work, costly enough to matter, and specific enough to verify.

Gate two: economics

Pain is not automatically valuable. Estimate the hours lost each week, the cost of those hours, and the cost of one failure. Many teams chase problems that demo well while the valuable work sits in less glamorous places such as contract review and risk control.

Gate three: feasibility

Can the current technology and the customer’s data reach the required quality? Answer two questions on site: where is the data and what state is it in, and what accuracy threshold is truly required? “99% usable” and “90% with human review” imply very different engineering costs. Mature teams build the evaluation set before they promise a launch.