Keynote at Elisa Innovation Days, 21 October 2026
Everything from the keynote is on this page: the handout, the slides, and the test for tomorrow’s hackathon.
Handout, 2 pages (PDF): Summary of the argument on one A4 sheet in the order I gave it.
Slides (PDF): The diagrams and the full RELEX case.
The argument in short
A pain point shows that a solution fits badly. A feature request is a solution someone has imagined. Neither describes the customer’s situation, so they can’t tell you what to build.
A customer problem is a concrete situation: what someone is trying to achieve, why, in what circumstances they can’t change, and by what criteria they judge the result. It is a fact you can go and discover. Once you have it, you can evaluate solutions against it before building anything.
It’s just like a foot and a shoe. A blister doesn’t tell you the shape of the foot.
At RELEX, discovery before development enabled a team of 3–4 to build an assortment management product that had 5 enterprise customers after the first year, and its first release was named a Leader by IDC.
Try this at the hackathon
Pick one person your challenge is about.
Write down one concrete situation in their life: what they are trying to get done, why, in what circumstances they can’t change, and how they would judge the result.
Then cross out everything that refers to a solution, such as tools, apps, forms or one organisation’s processes.
Keep only what reality imposes.
If you can’t write the description, you don’t yet know whether you are solving the right problem. You have some investigation to do.
Tell me what you liked and where I’m wrong
Help me develop this talk further! Feedback from the audience is priceless, as I don’t know how well my talk (a solution) fit your situation (the customer problem)!
What was the most useful part? What remained unclear? Where do you disagree? What was boring? I prefer direct feedback to polite.
If you have 15-20 minutes to give me feedback, book a meeting here, or send a message and we’ll schedule a time. Or if you prefer giving your thoughts in writing rather than talking with me, that would still be genuinely useful.
The newsletter
I publish Deductive Discovery, a newsletter for B2B software professionals who want a more direct route to Product-Market Fit. I write about why products fail at a fundamental level, how to discover customer problems instead of collecting pain points and feature requests, and what AI changes about product work and what it doesn’t.
New subscribers get my report How to Build a Lasting Competitive Advantage in B2B SaaS, based on interviews with 31 B2B SaaS executives and founders.
About Antti Latva-Koivisto
I help software teams work out what customers actually need, rather than what they ask for. I’ve spent over 25 years in B2B software development, at Comptel, at Nokia Software, and as a consultant to companies such as RELEX.
If something in the talk resonated with what you’re currently facing in your work, I’m happy to talk about it, no strings attached. Get in touch!