If a company hasn’t achieved product-market fit, how does choice of technology makes any difference to it’s success?

To me, it seems that the critical factor in their success is the pace at which they can iterate and adapt to market conditions.

As a result, the only part of “how” that is important is speed. The determining factor here is not inherent to the platform, but to the development team.

I should add a caveat to all this which is that my point of view applies most directly to web-based applications.

From an Entrepreneur point of view, product-market fit is the right answer, but then there is the “how” part, and that’s a different hat.

A CTO should care about methodology, philosophy, practice, pattern and how to take the vision into reality, following the directives the CEO has decided.

A VP of Engineering should care about language, source control, bug tracking, development environment, etc., following the directions the CTO wants to go.

A Senior Engineer should worry about which library to use, what the table schema will be, what protocol will be used to execute on the components and features decided by the CTO and VP of Engineering.

And that’s just the Technology side of things. There is the Marketing, Sales, BizDev, HR, Operations, Finance, Support, etc.

Each one has to own their piece of the pyramid, be influenced by the “next level”, but not have to worry about it.

In other words, in a well-functional company, the Senior Developer should not be worrying about product-market fit, because the CEO already has found that, or is in the right direction to prove that it exists.

Of course, on a lot of startups you have just 1-4 people, and most of them have to wear all the hats, all at once, and here’s where some people strive and some flounder. Can you write the jQuery code to animate a deletion of an item, think about a viral feature user experience, decide on which cloud computing technology to use, do a customer focus group and talk to investors to raise money all at the same time?