Beyond Mission-Passion Fit
Why Your Career Needs Product-Market Fit Too
You’re reading Playbooks & Priorities, a newsletter about working, parenting, and working parenthood.
Right around when kids turn two, they'll start going through a phase where they hate the car seat. Overnight, they go from being fine to HA-TING the car seat. They will fight everything about it—screaming, shouting, the whole performance. Kids have phases, but for working parents, this one is particularly painful. After a long day at work, you pick up a small human trying to take them home, and end up fighting them to get into the potentially life-saving device that will get you both home safely.
In my experience, when you see a parent across the daycare parking lot dealing with the screams and yelps and kicks and body jerking of a toddler determined not to be buckled in, there's this sense of camaraderie—not judgment—among the parents. For that moment, you get a nod and an "oh, I get it" look, and this sense that you've found your people.
Finding your people at work operates on a similar principle. It's often the difficult moments, the crises, the operational breakdowns that reveal who you really are and what you actually need to thrive. The easy times don't teach you much about fit.
About six months ago, I was having lunch with someone who was recently out of college. We were talking about our jobs, and he was telling me how passionate he was about his company's mission, and how it’s the most important thing to a job. I visibly rolled my eyes.
Don't get it wrong—what I do is important. But I wake up every day and go to work because I need to make money to give my family the lifestyle I want, not because I'm all about the mission. Maybe I'd feel differently if the mission was curing cancer, but I'm in the business of making money.
This conversation got me thinking about something we rarely discuss in career advice: the difference between mission-passion fit and what I call your career's product-market fit problem. Just like a startup can have an inspiring vision but fail because there's no market fit, you can be deeply aligned with a company's mission while being completely misaligned with how they actually operate.
Mission-Passion Fit: Necessary But Not Sufficient
Mission-passion fit is what gets all the attention. It's the inspiring elevator pitch, the "we're changing the world" narrative that makes your heart race during company presentations. It's what recruiters lead with, what gets splashed across career pages, and what makes us feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves.
Companies know this works. They lead with mission because it's emotionally compelling and helps them stand out in a crowded talent market. Who doesn't want to work somewhere that's making a difference?
But here's the thing: mission-passion fit is like falling in love with a product's vision statement while ignoring whether anyone actually wants to buy it. It feels amazing until you realize the day-to-day reality doesn't match the aspirational story.
I once took an environmental science class in college. To get to the lecture hall, you had to take an elevator, and on the way up, someone made a passing comment about how the environment needed to be the number one priority for Americans. I can still see the guy's face, but I just turned to him and said, "Nobody cares about the environment if they don't know where their dinner is coming from tonight."
The same principle applies to careers. Mission passion is a luxury that only works when your basic professional needs are being met.
The Costly Education of Strong Opinions
Here's what makes career product-market fit so tricky: you often don't know what you truly need until you've been burned by not having it. Most of our preferences about operational models, leadership styles, and decision-making processes sit in the mushy middle until something intense happens—a crisis, a major challenge, a spectacular failure—that forces you to form strong opinions.
This clarity feels like a prerequisite for applying product-market fit thinking to your career, but getting that clarity is expensive. You have to live through the misalignment to understand what alignment looks like.
I've learned over the past few years that decision-making speed is incredibly important to me, but I only learned this through experience. In 2021, I was consulting for a company that was trying to recruit me into a full-time position. I noticed a pattern of the CEO needing to have the same discussion with 4-5 people before making a final decision. What should have been a straightforward conversation dragged on for weeks. I watched this play out over and over and realized I could never work somewhere that moved that slowly on decisions. Before that experience, I might have said I preferred "thoughtful decision-making" without understanding the real cost of slow decisions on my effectiveness and sanity.
There's another complication: the rocketship problem. When you're lucky enough to join a company that's doing really well, success can numb your ability to see what parts of the operational model actually work versus what's just being masked by growth. If the business is working, it's hard to tell which operational elements are helping versus which ones would become problems in different circumstances.
Someone lucky enough to join a rocketship might also be unlucky in not seeing the downsides or learning what wouldn't work for them later in their career. Success covers a lot of operational sins, and you might not discover your true preferences until you're somewhere that doesn't have the luxury of momentum to paper over organizational dysfunction.
Your career's product-market fit comes down to whether how you work best aligns with how the company really operates. This includes:
Decision-making speed: Can they move fast enough for you? I've learned over the past couple of years that decision-making speed is incredibly important to me. A company could have the perfect mission, but if they take months to make decisions that should take days, I'm going to be frustrated daily.
Tool ecosystems: Yes, even something as mundane as their stance on Hiring you for buying Salesforce or Firing you for buying Salesforce matters. These aren't petty preferences—they're the daily infrastructure of how you get work done. The wrong tools and wrong perspectives can create friction in every task.
Communication patterns: Do they communicate in ways that work for your brain? Some people thrive on Slack chaos; others need structured meetings. Some want constant feedback; others prefer autonomous work with periodic check-ins and async standups.
Risk tolerance and bureaucracy: How much process and approval do they need versus how much autonomy you require? How do they handle failure and experimentation?
What "good work" looks like: Their definition of quality, their pace expectations, their thoughts on process, their collaboration style—all of this needs to mesh with how you truly produce your best work. Are they slow to release? Is everything in Beta?
When there's no product-market fit, you get daily friction despite good intentions. You'll find yourself constantly swimming upstream, wondering why you can't seem to be effective despite caring about the work. Great people leave "great" companies all the time because of this mismatch.
The Career Stewardship Principle
Here's where personal responsibility comes in: if you have career options, you have a responsibility to make good choices. Not everyone has this luxury—some people have jobs because they need to get paid, period. But if you're in a position to have choices about your career, it's your responsibility to be a good steward of those choices.
This means that if you're fundamentally misaligned with how a company operates, you should leave and find a better fit. I think about the Facebook whistleblower cases—if someone is truly that disillusioned with leadership and operations, staying and suffering isn't noble. It's a choice to remain stuck.
The hard truth is that most companies exist to make money first, and everything else second. My number one criticism of corporate whistleblower stories is that the protagonists often seem so focused on doing what's "right" that they forget they're working for businesses designed to generate profit. This isn't cynicism; it's reality. And you can't make good career decisions while ignoring reality.
We only have so much time and energy, and you need to focus your limited bandwidth on the right things. That includes making sure you're at a company where you have alignment with both the mission and the operating model.
Finding Your Career's Product-Market Fit (Despite the Limitations)
Given how hard it is to know your true preferences before you've been tested, how do you evaluate fit during the hiring process? You're essentially trying to predict compatibility based on limited information, knowing that your strongest opinions will come from experiences you haven't had yet.
The goal during interviews is to discern whether this company is made up of "your people"—not whether the job will be easy, but whether you'll be facing inevitable challenges alongside people who work the way you work. Pay attention to early signals and minor friction points, even when everything else seems promising.
Companies are working hard to figure out if they're aligned with you during the hiring process. You should return the favor, but recognize the limitations of what you can learn in advance.
Mission-passion fit questions: Do you care about what they're building? Does their vision inspire you? Do you want this company to succeed?
Product-market fit questions: How do they make decisions? What tools do they use and why? How do they handle disagreement? What does a typical week look like? How do they define and measure good work? Most importantly: How did they handle their last major crisis or setback?
Red flags emerge when companies can't answer the operational "how" questions clearly, or when they deflect them back to mission "why" answers. If they can't articulate how they actually work, they probably don't work very well.
Green flags appear when their daily operational reality aligns with your needs and preferences. When you can imagine not just surviving but thriving in their described environment, especially during the difficult times.
Once you're in a role, the evaluation continues. You should regularly assess whether you're still working with your people. This doesn't mean jumping ship at the first sign of difficulty—it means being honest about whether the difficulties you're facing are the kind that help you grow or the kind that slowly wear you down.
Making the Adult Choice
The hardest career decisions happen when you have strong mission-passion fit but poor product-market fit. Maybe you love what the company is building but hate how they build it. Maybe the mission energizes you but the environment drains you.
To be clear: this isn't about quitting the moment things get difficult. Every job has hard moments, and some of the most growth happens when you push through challenges with people who share your values and approach to work. The question isn't whether you're facing difficulties—it's whether you're facing them with your people.
When you're struggling alongside colleagues who approach problems the way you do, who communicate in ways that work for your brain, and who make decisions at a pace that feels right to you, those struggles become learning experiences. When you're struggling in an environment that fundamentally mismatches how you work best, those same struggles become sources of chronic frustration and diminished effectiveness.
In these fundamental misalignment situations, staying often becomes a form of self-sabotage. You're choosing daily friction over the temporary discomfort of change. You're prioritizing the story you tell others about your job over the reality you live every day.
Here's the paradox: when you find better product-market fit, you often end up contributing more effectively to missions you care about. Your increased effectiveness and reduced friction mean you can actually have more impact on the work that matters to you.
I've come to appreciate how much seemingly small operational details matter to my day-to-day satisfaction and effectiveness. An incredible mission at a company with the wrong operating model would frustrate me to no end, while a more modest mission at a company that operates the way I work best would probably result in better outcomes for everyone.
Your career needs both types of fit to succeed
Developing the wisdom to recognize good fit is itself a career-long process. Mission-passion fit gives you energy and purpose. Product-market fit gives you effectiveness and sustainability. One without the other is like a startup with great vision but no customers, or great customers but no vision.
The hard truth is that you'll probably need to experience some misalignment to learn what alignment looks like. The parent wrestling with a screaming toddler in a car seat learns something about patience and perspective that the parent of a compliant child never will. Your career misfits teach you as much as your career fits.
If you're lucky enough to have career options, use them wisely—but also recognize that wisdom comes through experience, and experience often comes through difficulty. Be honest about what you need to do your best work, not just what sounds inspiring at dinner parties. But also be patient with yourself as you figure out what those needs are.
The goal isn't to avoid all career misalignment—that's probably impossible and definitely expensive. The goal is to recognize misalignment when it happens and make thoughtful choices about when to stay and learn versus when to cut your losses and find your people elsewhere.
The Extra Point
The Extra Point is a segment where I highlight a brand or product I’ve tried recently with an honest review. We’ll try it and see if it scores…
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