How “eating our own dog food” turned Venture Guidebook into a PMF System
- Jürg Truniger
- Jan 10
- 4 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Over the last few weeks, we quietly rolled out the latest evolution of Venture Guidebook. If you’ve visited our website, you’ve probably noticed changes. Here’s the backstory: what shifted, why it mattered, and what it means for B2B Tech leaders.
More effort, less impact: How trial-and-error keeps B2B Tech companies stuck below their potential
If you lead a B2B Tech company, you’ve survived the “transformational” off-site that ends as a graveyard of slides, SharePoint links, and good intentions. We’ve been there. Competing “sources of truth,” priorities that flip, teammates rotating out, until firefighting becomes normal and culture needs constant rescue.
That’s exactly why we started Venture Guidebook: to help B2B Tech teams convert effort into effective value creation, not admin drag.
Flashback: The Five‑Leaf Flower for B2B Tech
That's where Venture Guidebook began. We took a systems-thinking approach to build an inter-disciplinary methodology: mapping recurring blockers into five underserved areas, each one a "leaf" that needs attention:
Customer – identify exactly who you target, including their challenges and aspirations
Story – build a narrative that converts curiosity into trust
Offering – package value that survives negotiation and delivers outcomes
Channel – streamline paths to market so adoption feels friction‑free
Company – align ops, culture, and incentives to unlock execution
Forged from our own battles with scattered effort and moving targets, we shaped practical frameworks for each leaf: Target Sweet Spot, Positioning Statement, UVP, ICP, FitFinder, Offering Spectrum, etc. Because they work as a connected system, a change in one area surfaces what else needs attention.
The Light‑Bulb Moment
We always believed GenAI would amplify these tools: faster cycles, higher-quality outputs. Our early runs were… hand-knitted: prompts in app #1, outputs in app #2, slides in app #3. Insightful? Yes. Smooth? Not really.
Then a platform partner released an integrated GenAI extension. Overnight, we could pull our methodology into a single workspace: executable tools (frameworks + prompts), structured assets (actual deliverables), and collaboration (editing, comments, version control), all in tandem.
Dog‑Food Diaries: Rebuilding Ourselves First
We used the new workspace ourselves. Revisiting our Target Sweet Spot triggered a chain: Positioning Statement → UVP → ICP → Offering Structure. We iterated until everything held up, refining:
Augmented frameworks with prompts tuned to the latest LLMs
Seamless connections between tools
A better balance between human judgment and AI horsepower
Through rapid iteration, redesigning and refining, we pressure-tested every link.
What stuck:
Guided impact chains. When our offering evolved, the system showed exactly what needed updating downstream. No more guessing. Just a clear path from Target Sweet Spot → Positioning Statement → UVP → ICP, etc.
Automatic context. Every tool drew on our specific business context to produce concrete assets, tailored insights, flagged gaps, and clear actions.
Human + AI outperforms either alone. AI handled the heavy-lifting: depth and speed we couldn't match manually. But insights only became ours through debate and refinement, in live sessions and threaded comments. The structured chains kept that collaboration on-track.
The result: power steering, not autopilot. The connected frameworks sharpened our focus and kept us aligned, but we made every call, from micro-choices to big bets. We owned the final assets; AI accelerated how we got there.
The litmus test: from insights to handoffs
Power steering matters, but so does the handoff. AI-powered frameworks surface deep insights fast, helping leadership find focus and alignment. But strategic clarity only creates value when it reaches the teams who execute: marketing, sales, customer success, product, or external partners. These people need precise, actionable instructions in their language. Without that translation, B2B Tech stays stuck in trial-and-error.
That's why we added diagnostics: translate insights into actionable instructions, hand off to execution teams, measure what execution delivers, verify results, then refine. The loop becomes: insights → execution → diagnostics → refinement → …
Our shift: methodology → PMF System
Through this process, something clicked: Venture Guidebook isn't just a set of interconnected tools. It's a system to diagnose product-market fit and surface the actions to achieve and strengthen it: a "PMF System.”
PMF Diagnostics: A comprehensive assessment of your offering, competitors, markets, and personas, with recommended actions tailored to the unique context of your B2B Tech business.
Orchestrated Leadership Plays. PMF Diagnostics flow directly into usable outputs through curated "plays" that combine related assets. For example, the "Customer-Centricity Play" bundles Target Sweet Spot, Positioning Statement, UVP, and ICP into an aligned foundation for downstream deliverables like narratives and target account lists.
Integrated Workspace. GTM, product, professional services, and engineering shape strategy and push executable instructions in the same collaborative space: everyone affected is involved..
Compared with the traditional "trial-and-error" or "strategy deck" grind, the PMF System delivers focus and alignment:
Structured intelligence over impulse. Human-AI workflows replace scattered prompts and gut calls.
Connected teams over silos. One evolving system replaces disconnected departments with different languages and agendas.
Effective collaboration over admin drag. No more "lost head versions" buried in SharePoint or Confluence.
Applying our own method to ourselves is what evolved Venture Guidebook and reinforced our ambition: a PMF System for customer-centricity, team engagement, and durable value creation. The enemy is entropy: firefighting and micromanagement on one side, paralysis and ghosting on the other. Free up energy for the messy outside world, not continuous self-absorption.
We've already opened the PMF System to selected customers, external experts and accelerator programs: building toward network effects across the B2B Tech ecosystem with shared plays, shared frameworks, and success stories built by practitioners, for practitioners.
B2B Tech leader: want a single PMF System that turns insights into execution?
Get in touch to diagnose your current PMF, identify highest-impact actions, and track outcomes in Venture Guidebook.