Why I was extra quiet

I've been coaching 10 teams over the last months. It's been intense.
But added on top, I've been building juttu.co with two incredible co-founders.
The good thing: I have a lot more learning to share here, on this newsletter and blog.
The bad thing: I've been even more inconsistent in sharing that knowledge than I anticipated. But that's coming.

Today, I'll keep it short. Give you a quick update on what has been happening and what 2 things that taught me about Product Discovery.

1 - Building and shipping your own SaaS is hard

Now, I get to coach teams and tell them what to do better in terms of Discovery. That's an easy job.
Since I am actually responsible end-to-end from Discovery, to coding, to shipping a user experience that solves a real problem, I have no excuses, I have no cover.

Some internet people might call this: Actually being in the arena. Some might say that is overly dramatic.

If our Product Discovery provided direction and de-risked our roadmap is all visible, in the open and very clear to evaluate.
As a PM, even as a senior PM, even while managing Junior PMs, I still had cover. So many historical factors of why a product might not achieve what we wanted. So many proxy KPIs to obfuscate the picture.

Now there is just a blank Stripe Dashboard. Or in our case a Paddle Dashboard.

If the SaaS you build yourself will be a success is impossible to tell. But I can promise you, it is by far the best way I've found to rapidly improve your Discovery skills.

2 - Finding your ICP is harder

What I've (re)learned. Product Discovery is there to sharpen your ICP.
It's about building better solutions for a smaller audience.

At Juttu, we are trying to not screw this up (again).
So we made the hard decision to focus on only
- B2B product teams
- that want to talk to their own users

That's hard because prospective users asked us for an external testing pool to recruit from.
And two CPOs asked me for an option to onboard their B2C teams as well.

So we're saying NO and we commit to that smaller audience.

Maybe you can apply this to your own Product Discovery? See where you can actually use it to sharpen your ICP.

I'll be sharing more Discovery lessons in coming posts. Here is a teaser:

• We discovered that Discovery is a vitamin to many, more than people led us to believe. This is the opposite of "ask them what they need and they'll say: a fast horse". In this case people told us "we really, really want to do Discovery urgently" and then never felt the pain of not doing it.
• I finally have a clear positioning for my Coaching. That took 2.5 years to discover. Now I'm not communicating it well enough to clients. I guess I have PMF (it pays the bills) but an unclear value prop/ICP stunts growth.

That's it for today. I hope you have a focused day ahead!

Niko

Before you go: We are looking for 6 more innovators that want to be our first users.

1. Are you PM, Designer or Product Lead of a B2B Product Team?
2. Do you want to talk to your users regularly?
3. You're curious to shape a fresh product on the market. You want to help us make Juttu fit your Continuous Discovery needs?

If so, reply to this email or reach out to hey@juttu.co and I'll be happy to tell you all about it.