In May 2025, news about Grab in Thailand reminded me of a Facebook post I shared back in 2020 about Product Market Fit and Value Proposition Canvas. It highlighted a powerful insight: because at its core, building a successful product isn't about adding more features. It's about solving real problems people care about.

"Great products don’t just grow — they stay true to the problem they’re solving"

What Is Product-Market Fit?

Product-market fit means your product solves a real problem — and your users feel it.

When you have PMF:

• Users keep coming back
• Word-of-mouth happens naturally
• You don’t need to force growth — it pulls itself

Before scaling or launching features, smart teams always ask: Does this actually help our users solve a pain they care about?

Product-market fit (PMF) isn’t just a startup thing. Big companies like Grab still work hard to maintain it.

Tools like the Value Proposition Canvas help companies understand what their customers need and how to deliver value.

Value Proposition Canvas

The slide mapped out Grab’s value proposition like this:

• Jobs to be Done: Call a taxi, pay in cash
• Pains: No one picks up, drivers reject, feel unsafe
• Gains: Want the ride to come quickly, want to know who’s driving

On the solution side, Grab delivered:

• Grab App: Show ETA, real-time tracking
• Driver Profiles: Let families know who’s behind the wheel
• No Rejection: Matching that doesn’t leave users hanging

Grab is a great example of this. From the beginning, Grab focused on solving everyday transportation and convenience problems for people in Southeast Asia. Even as the company grew and added new services, it kept working on these same core issues. This focus on real customer needs is a big reason why Grab has stayed successful, while other companies sometimes struggle to keep up.

The key lesson

Grab’s long-term success comes from always focusing on their customers’ main problems—like making transportation easy, safe, and reliable. Even after growing and adding new services, Grab keeps coming back to these basic needs.

Product-Market Fit isn’t something you achieve once and forget.

Use tools like Value Proposition Canvas to help uncover what really matters to users.