Many professionals fall into a frustrating trap: they are reliable, responsive, and work incredibly hard, yet they watch others get promoted while they remain stuck. According to Steve Quinn, a former Principal Engineer at Amazon, the issue is rarely a lack of skill or effort. Instead, it is a lack of alignment. Success in your career depends on applying the startup concept of “Product-Market Fit” to your daily work.

The Core Concept: Career Product-Market Fit

In the startup world, you can have brilliant technology and a hardworking team, but if there is no market for what you are building, the company will fail. Your career works the same way:

• The Product: Your skills, unique strengths, and capacity to solve problems.
• The Market: The expensive, painful problems your company desperately needs solved.

Most people spend their careers perfecting their “product” (learning new frameworks, refactoring code for purity) without considering if there is a “market” for it. If you are solving problems you care about rather than problems your leadership cares about, your hard work will remain invisible.

Step 1: Market Research (Finding the “Expensive Pain”)

To find your market, you must treat your manager as your primary customer. However, you should stop asking vague questions like “How is my performance?” which yield polite, useless answers. Instead, apply the principles of The Mom Test by asking specifically about pain points:

• “What is the most frustrating part of your week?”
• “What is the biggest thing slowing the team down right now?”
• “If you could wave a magic wand and solve one problem, what would it be?”

The answers to these questions reveal “expensive pain.” Solving these specific issues attracts attention, budget, and recognition.

Step 2: Identify Your Unique Product

Once you identify the pain, you need to align it with your natural strengths. To identify your unique value proposition, ask yourself:

1. Natural Gravitation: What kind of problems are you naturally drawn to (e.g., untangling legacy code, mentoring, crisis management)?
2. Energy Audit: What activities give you energy while draining others?
3. The Brushed-Off Compliment: What compliments do you dismiss because the task felt “too easy”? These indicate high-value skills that come naturally to you.

Step 3: Execution via “The Value Loop”

Being helpful isn’t enough; you must become essential. Quinn suggests a three-step framework called the Value Loop to turn solutions into systems:

• Solve for One: Find one person with a nagging problem and fix it completely for them. Don’t try to boil the ocean immediately; deliver one undeniable win.
• Generalize the Solution: Turn that one-off fix into a reusable tool, template, or documented process (e.g., turning a manual script into an internal automation tool).
• Announce the Product: This is where most fail. You must market your solution. Post it in team channels or present it in meetings. This shifts your reputation from someone who “did a task” to someone who “solves a class of problems.”

Conclusion

The hardest workers do not always win. The winners are those who connect their unique abilities to real problems that people desperately need solving. By shifting your focus from “improving skills” to “solving expensive pain,” your effort becomes visible, and you transition from being merely helpful to being essential.

Mentoring question

Look at your current to-do list: Which tasks are simply ‘polishing your product’ (work you enjoy but others may not value), and which tasks directly solve an ‘expensive pain’ that keeps your manager up at night?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xa0Dcxd-qA8&is=LKNrpvyZUZpgKOuU