Unity SCM’s Playbook: Building Product-Market Fit Without the Hockey Stick

Unity SCM’s Playbook: Building Product-Market Fit Without the Hockey Stick

The startup world’s obsession with hockey stick growth curves has created a distorted view of product-market fit. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Unity SCM founder Amir Taichman shared a refreshingly different perspective on building sustainable B2B success.

Redefining Product-Market Fit

“Product market fit is a bit of an overloaded term,” Amir explains, challenging the common narrative that product-market fit means explosive growth. Instead, Unity SCM focused on a more nuanced definition: “We have a product, there is a market, there is fit between them. There’s still more work to fine tune that, to get a fully repeatable, fully scalable process.”

The Equilibrium Model

Rather than chasing rapid growth at any cost, Unity views company building as a series of equilibrium states. As Amir describes it, “At any point of the company’s lifecycle, you are trying to get to an equilibrium where all these different pieces kind of hum along effectively together.”

This approach recognizes the interconnected nature of business decisions. Amir explains: “There’s a very intricate set of relationships between the different aspects of your business… So there’s a very strong relationship between what product you built and what trade offs you made when you build that product.”

Managing Phase Transitions

One of Unity’s key insights is understanding how growth creates new challenges. Amir describes these moments as “phase transitions” where “it almost feels like a moment after you reach the next step of success, everything stops working at the exact same time.”

For example, signing a major customer can disrupt existing processes: “You close that one big strategic customer, that’s just beyond your capacity to handle, and now everything comes crashing now because they have more needs, and you don’t have customers, enough customer success, and you don’t have engineering, and there’s tech debt.”

The Customer-Driven Growth Engine

Instead of focusing on growth metrics alone, Unity built their success on deep customer relationships. “If you have happy customers using your product… they’ll introduce you to new problems,” Amir notes. “And while every company thinks they’re a snowflake, they’re not. The same problems exist for other companies with similar characteristics.”

This approach created a natural expansion path: “We manage to learn from our happy customers about new use cases that we can help solve with our platform, and then we can turn around and find other companies that have the same problems.”

Alternative Success Metrics

Unity measures success through multiple lenses beyond growth rates:

• Customer satisfaction and expansion
• Problem-solving capability
• Operational stability
• Team equilibrium
• Sustainable processes

As Amir explains, “I think a lot of really solid businesses don’t just explode one day… It’s a really long journey for overnight success.”

The Power of Intentionality

The key to Unity’s approach is maintaining intentionality in every decision. “Being super intentional about how you go about it and based on the base assumptions and thesis and principles… never forget those and be intentional about it,” Amir advises.

For founders challenging conventional wisdom about growth, Unity’s experience offers valuable lessons. Product-market fit isn’t just about explosive growth – it’s about building sustainable processes that create lasting value for customers while maintaining operational equilibrium.

Sometimes the path to building something revolutionary requires ignoring the pressure for hockey stick growth and instead focusing on building a foundation that can support long-term success. As Amir’s experience shows, this measured approach can create more sustainable and ultimately more valuable companies.