Who owns Product Market Fit?

Jacob Duval

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September 29, 2025

Who Owns Product-Market Fit?

Product-market fit (PMF) is one of those concepts that leadership thinks about a lot, but no one wants to take responsibility for. Is it the product manager’s job? The CEO’s? Marketing, sales, or customer success?

The reason it feels so risky to take responsibility for PMF is simple: no one person owns product-market fit. It’s a collective responsibility that demands alignment across your entire organization.

Why PMF Can’t Be Owned by Just One Role

PMF is about the relationship between your product and the market — how well your solution solves real customer problems and creates sustainable demand.

If you think about it, no single role holds all the levers that make this happen. Product teams build and iterate, but they rely on insights from sales, support, and marketing. Marketing helps understand and reach customers. Sales and customer success hear firsthand what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Without close collaboration, the picture is incomplete. You might build something that looks great in a roadmap but falls flat with real users. Or you might have great demand but a product that disappoints.

No, the CPO isn't responsible for it

A CPO should really, really care about Product Market Fit, but the second they are put "in charge" of it, you're doomed to fail. It's kind of like how the COO doesn't "own" culture, but they need to care about it. The job of the CPO is to upskill everyone in the company to be thinking about how they contribute to PMF. That alone, is a massive amount of work (especially if you're not using Rough).

Building confidence across your team is the only real way for signals to flow effectively throughout your org. This is why when we do workshops, the first thing we focus on is measuring the Psychological Safety in your team. Low Psychological Safety leads to hard questions not being asked, which leads to a loss of Product Market Fit.

The Team Effort Behind True PMF

Product Managers play a central role, synthesizing data, feedback, and vision into prioritized work. They’re often the driving force behind PMF discovery and validation.

But equally important are the roles around them:

Customer Success and Support teams bring critical signals about usage pain points and churn risks.
Sales uncovers objections, competitor comparisons, and buyer motivations.
Marketing tests messaging and channels to find where real interest and retention come from.
Engineering and Design enable rapid experimentation and product improvements that respond to evolving customer needs.

When these groups share a common understanding of who the customer is, what the problem really is, and how success looks, PMF becomes a shared goal rather than a mysterious milestone.

Leadership’s Role in Fostering PMF Ownership

At scale, leadership has an outsized role to play. They need to create a culture that values cross-functional collaboration and transparency.

Leaders should make the problem space clear, set aligned objectives tied to customer outcomes, and empower teams with the right data and autonomy to experiment.

They also have to resist the urge to declare PMF prematurely or hide behind vanity metrics. Instead, leadership’s job is to foster the ongoing process of discovery, learning, and adaptation.

How to Embed PMF Ownership in Your Organization

Create shared goals around customer success and retention rather than isolated feature delivery.
Establish regular cross-team syncs focused on customer insights and product impact.
Make customer feedback visible and actionable across departments.
Celebrate experiments and learning — even when they don’t lead to immediate wins.
Use alignment workshops and frameworks (like those Rough promotes) to keep everyone grounded in the same reality.