Deductive Discovery: Product discovery for B2B SaaS leaders who want a more direct path to Product-Market Fit.
B2B SaaS teams talk to customers, collect feedback, build features and iterate. Many still struggle to gain traction. Customers remain indifferent while the product grows in complexity but not in value.
The usual advice is to iterate more, faster. But for large B2B software, iteration of the whole product is too slow and expensive to be the primary learning mechanism. And feedback from testing solutions doesn’t tell you what matters the most: the underlying customer problems.
The standard discovery playbook has a structural flaw that’s critical for complex B2B software. It conflates understanding customer problems with testing solutions. Teams iterate on prototypes before working out what the product should do and why in the first place. Feature requests pile up, the product gets bloated, and the chance of a focused, scalable solution slips away.
This newsletter is about a different discovery approach: starting with the customers’ real situations rather than solution ideas, and reaching the right product through understanding and reasoning rather than trial and error.
What you’ll find here
I write about the decisions that determine whether a B2B product succeeds or fails, usually well before a line of code gets written.
Topics include:
Why mainstream product discovery methods fall short for complex B2B software, and what to do instead
How to discover underlying customer problems instead of pain points, feature requests and opinions
How AI changes what product teams should focus on, and what it doesn’t change at all
Practical methods for getting deep access to customers even if you have nothing to show them yet
Case studies of B2B SaaS companies that invested in understanding before building, and what happened when others didn’t
Deductive Innovation, a systematic methodology I have developed for discovering customer problems and deducing optimal solutions from them
The common thread across all my topics: Customer problems exist as facts in the world, independent of any solution. When you understand those facts well enough, good product decisions follow.
Customers’ complaints, requests and opinions are clues, but they are not the foundation. The foundation is concrete knowledge of what customers are trying to accomplish, why, in what circumstances, under what constraints, and by what criteria they judge success.
About me
I am Antti Latva-Koivisto, a product discovery specialist based in Helsinki with 25+ years in B2B software product development.
For most of those years, I’ve been driven by a conviction that there must be objectively better and worse ways to create large B2B and enterprise software. The process and its results can’t come down to opinion, intuition or luck. I refused to accept that building the wrong thing and trying to fix it through iteration was the best the industry could do.
This led me to develop Deductive Innovation, a methodology for discovering customer problems as solution-independent facts and reasoning the right solutions from them. I have applied it across industries including retail, telecommunications, finance, manufacturing and construction, in leading roles at Nokia Software and Comptel (acquired by Nokia for €357M) and through consulting engagements with B2B SaaS companies like RELEX Solutions.
I have conducted dozens of in-depth interviews with B2B SaaS product executives and founders as part of my own discovery research. Those conversations inform much of what I publish here.
What others have said:
“The systematic discovery work Antti did was incredibly useful. We used the results to build our go-to-market strategy and make sure we had a credible scope. Antti’s work was a real cornerstone of our progress, as it was a direct line from his discovery work into development.”
— VP of Product
“Antti is excellent at finding out what a customer’s real needs are and how those needs connect to each other, regardless of the complexity. The more complex the problem area is, the more inspired and productive Antti gets.”
— Product Design Lead
“Antti’s professional expertise helped us accelerate our development efforts. I warmly recommend him especially if the goal is to fast-track the development of your new product. He has exceptional expertise in the critical early-stage product development tasks: discovering customer needs, producing a holistic view of a complex problem space, and analysing it.”
— Product Manager
“I like Antti’s approach of taking key use cases and thinking through them in detail before starting development. This is what we want. This is the kind of added value we appreciate.”
— a customer of an enterprise software product
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New subscribers receive a free copy of “How to Build a Lasting Competitive Advantage in B2B SaaS”, a report with insights from 31 product executives and founders I interviewed about what drives B2B product success and failure.
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