My first job out of the gate wasn't a product job on paper. I was evaluating and recommending technology training programs for students at an engineering college, matching what we offered against what students needed for their careers. Nobody called it "product-market fit." I didn't have the term yet. I had the problem anyway.
The trap every early-career version of this falls into
The obvious move, and the wrong one, is to recommend the program that looks most impressive: the flashiest certification, the partner with the biggest logo. That's optimizing for the pitch, not the fit. Most of those programs failed the same way an over-engineered feature fails: technically credible, adopted by almost nobody, because it solved a problem the student didn't have.
A training program fits when a student can name, specifically, the job or path it gets them closer to, before they finish it. If the honest answer is "it'll look good on a resume," that's not fit. That's decoration.
What predicted a good recommendation
The programs that worked shared one trait: I could trace a straight line from the certification to an actual internship pipeline or job requirement, because the partnership behind it, with a ministry or a company, was built for that specific outcome, not bolted on afterward for credibility.
The programs that didn't work had impressive names and vague outcomes. Nobody could tell you what a student would be able to do differently after finishing one. That vagueness is the tell. It shows up in enterprise software the same way: a feature with an impressive name and no one who can describe the specific job it does.
If you can't name the exact door a program, or a feature, opens for the person on the other end, you haven't found fit. You've found a good demo.
Why I'd argue this was harder than later product work
Later, in software, I had frameworks, templates, and a title that gave the work a name. At the start, I had none of that. I had a student in front of me, a stack of program brochures, and the responsibility of not wasting a year of that student's time on something that looked good and did nothing. That's product-market fit with the stakes made personal and the safety net removed.
It's the reason I trust instinct over template when evaluating any new offering now, technical or not. Ask what specific door this opens, for a specific person, and whether they can walk through it faster because it exists. Everything else is decoration on top of that one question.