On structuration, feedback loops, and why fit changes as users and products change one another
Product-market fit is often spoken about as if it were a threshold you cross. Before it, confusion and struggle. After it, resonance and growth. That framing is useful motivationally. It is not very good sociology.
Products do not meet markets in a static moment. They enter living systems. Users change their behavior in response to the product. The product changes in response to users. Norms form. Power users emerge. content patterns settle. New expectations become normal. The "market" you fit is already being reshaped by the interaction itself.
That is why a product can feel well-fit at one stage and lose its fit later without any obvious single failure. The system has changed.
Anthony Giddens's idea of structuration is useful because it gives a name to this recursive relationship. Structures shape action, but action also reproduces and changes structure. In product terms: the system influences what people do, and what people do influences what the system becomes.
The concept sounds abstract until you look at algorithmic or community products. TikTok's recommendation system shapes what users see and what they make, but the resulting user behavior also retrains the system. Wikipedia's rules shape editing, but editors' collective actions reshape the rules. The product is not just fitting a market. It is co-producing the environment it is supposedly fitting into.
That is why I find static PMF language too neat. It suggests a product discovers its market the way a key discovers a lock. In reality, product and market often keep changing one another.
When teams treat PMF as a stable asset, they can become blind to the social feedback loops underneath it. A community product may grow while becoming less trustworthy. A marketplace may scale while concentrating visibility too hard. A collaboration tool may succeed first with one organizational culture and fail as it expands into others. An algorithmic feed may feel magical early and degrading later.
None of these outcomes are weird exceptions. They are what happens when product teams talk about fit as if it were a static property rather than an ongoing relationship.
This is also why product-market fit can look deceptively individual on a dashboard. The metrics tell you users came back. They do not always tell you what kind of social order made them come back, or how fragile that order might become over time.
Teams need to watch the recursive layer, not only the performance layer. How are norms changing? Who is shaping the environment? What behaviors are being amplified? What new forms of dependence are emerging? What used to feel healthy but is now being gamed? Those are PMF questions too, even if they do not sound like classic growth questions.
It also means being careful about copy-pasting playbooks. What worked for fit at one stage may stop working at another because the product has altered the social conditions around itself. The very success of the first phase can create the instability of the next one.
This is one reason I see Community Health Is Product Health and Products Don't Just Solve Problems. They Organize Power. as part of the PMF conversation. Fit depends on the evolving social system, not just on retained demand.
Product-market fit is not a trophy you place on a shelf. It is an ongoing relationship between a system and the people changing it from the inside. The teams that remember this tend to be less surprised by the future they are actively creating.