Let’s discuss the way to elevate your product technique with an outcome-driven storytelling mannequin.
When it involves discussing and evangelizing product technique, correct framing and supply is important for sharing information and interesting audiences. It’s why product managers are intuitively drawn to the assemble of a narrative when they’re occupied with conveying product technique.
In spite of everything, doesn’t a superb story make the message extra relatable and compelling? A well-articulated product technique has the facility to inspire, encourage, and even promote.
Product managers have the accountability to teach companions and collaborators on the important thing factors of product technique all through all phases of a product’s life.
A product technique faces the distinctive problem of serving each its group’s pursuits and consumer/market pursuits concurrently. By their nature, product methods are conceptually dense and require tons of supporting context. The flexibility to articulate product technique properly shouldn’t be taken as a right.
In case you’re a product supervisor with some expertise, you in all probability already know the way simple it’s to debilitate a product technique dialogue with poor framing and convoluted explanations. You will have skilled how unsettling it may be when a consumer or stakeholder “isn’t getting it” and launches a sequence of pointed, derailing questions. If not, properly then we’ve all seen somebody bomb on Shark Tank.
Even probably the most good methods aren’t going to elucidate themselves; additionally they require and deserve well-crafted storytelling. It goes with out saying that one of the vital vital abilities for a product supervisor to develop is the artwork of presenting product methods.
Through the years, I’ve discovered that the magic components for high-impact product technique presentation is to make the most of a [product narrative] + [system of stories] method.
You is likely to be questioning: “how is a story completely different from tales?” and “what’s a system of tales?”. Let’s tackle these vital questions.
- An excellent story has characters with motivations driving them to motion, a plot, occasions transpiring, and a decision.
- In contrast, a story is a contextual container for a system of tales (credit score to Tamsen Webster for these definitions).
In a product technique context, “system of tales” refers to the concept that a product technique sometimes displays a plan to pursue greater than only one strategic consequence. Every consequence might be advised as its personal story. The synergy between these tales displays the next stage of technique that ties on to the organizational mission.
Whereas storytelling strategies will carry product methods to life in probably the most relatable and interesting approach, an overarching product narrative creates leverage by supplying important “greater image” context.
Extra virtually, establishing a product narrative reduces the necessity to pause and clarify background particulars about particular factors of technique. This improves conversational circulate, maintains viewers engagement, and creates extra highly effective “ah ha!” moments.
Let’s discover the [product narrative] + [system of stories] ideas intimately:
The Product Narrative Canvas is impressed by the favored enterprise mannequin and product positioning canvases, however it’s tailored to assist what product leaders spend much more time on — evangelizing product technique.
A product narrative captures a number of higher-order ideas and unifying themes about your group. Whereas product methods will evolve and have to be re-told periodically, the broader product narrative will stay fixed. And the place product methods sometimes have a 6–12 month time horizon, a product narrative is open-ended and will stay related for a few years.
I developed the Product Narrative Canvas as a information to capturing the important factors of context to assist product technique storytelling. It’s about understanding that high-impact technique storytelling wants to ascertain credibility whereas interesting to logic and emotion.
I’ll clarify every side of the canvas in additional element:
Place your group
Focus on your group’s ethos, passions, and competencies as they relate to the product you provide. These organizational particulars ought to encourage belief that your group is well-suited to offer this product.
Painting your imaginative and prescient
Encourage your viewers with an thought of the totally realized, value-added, finish state of your product. What is going to the lives of the personas in your market appear like after product has modified them? A product imaginative and prescient sometimes displays a 3 to 10 12 months time horizon.
Convey distinctive insights and truths held
Clarify uniquely held information that empowers and guides your group by means of its product mission. Do have entry to mission important insights or proprietary information that different orgs don’t have? An “earned secret”, so to talk?
Articulate the market-level problem
Because it pertains to the worth proposition of your product, what are the unmet wants, issues, and unfulfilled needs that your market faces? Are they certainly pressing and pervasive issues with a market willingness to pay for an answer?
Your articulation of the market-level problem ought to reinforce the fact of the issue in your audiences minds. What you share ought to attempt to elicit emotion and encourage confidence that you simply completely perceive your market’s wants.
Declare your mission
Clarify your dedication to fixing the market stage drawback by means of your course, objectives, and guiding ideas. Do you’ve gotten an “unfair benefit” in fixing this market drawback that different organizations don’t possess?
In distinction to your product imaginative and prescient, a mission will sometimes have a 6–18 month time horizon. Your product mission ought to relate on to the “golden thread” of synergy and unifying themes throughout your product technique. Learn extra about this under.
Place your product
As captured within the well-liked product positioning template, a positioning assertion brings collectively: 1) goal market, 2) market’s desired advantages/outcomes, 3) your product id, 4) related product categorization, 5) resolution/purpose to purchase, 6) acknowledgement of class opponents, 7) key factors of differentiation.
Since the remainder of the weather of Product Narrative Canvas have established credibility and appealed to your market’s feelings, this positioning assertion might merely seize the logical conclusion that your product is the correct one for this market, challenges confronted, and options desired.
Word how the six components of the Product Narrative Canvas tackle above communicate to at least one or a mix of credibility, logic, and emotion.
The next is an instance of a the Product Narrative Canvas for a hypothetical customized ski boot fitter serving skiers in Utah’s Wasatch vary:
Along with the six foundational prompts included within the canvas, I encourage product managers to think about two extra questions:
- “Why us?” as an extension of organizational positioning (versus every other group) and,
- “Why now?” as an extension of the market stage problem and distinctive insights
In extremely aggressive or complicated market ecosystems, your organizational positioning might have a finer level of distinction from different potential opponents. For instance, I as soon as labored for a smaller group which competed with choices from Google. We acknowledged that Google may probably deploy aggressive sources that far exceeded ours at any level. It was important for us to have a crystal clear reply to “Why Us?” relative to Google that went past our ethos, passions, and core competencies.
Equally, market ecosystems might evolve such that there are slender home windows of alternative for some merchandise to enter and turn into profitable. If this situation applies to your market or product, construct in your narrative’s distinctive insights and articulation of the market problem to deal with the “Why Now?” timeliness of your resolution.
The weather of a product narrative are equally at house in a pitch deck for prospects or traders as they’re in conversations with a cross-functional product growth crew. They need to be an aligning, inspiring, and motivating drive internally inside a company.
Relating to technique storytelling, the primary and most vital precept is to be outcome-oriented. Conserving it “outcome-level” elevates the dialog to issues of “why” and leaves room for the very best options to be found and optimized over time.
An excellent outcome-driven story has characters with motivations driving them to motion, a plot, and a decision. Product storytelling ought to leverage the identical constructs.
Right here’s how the story constructs relate to product methods:
- Characters are the personas in your goal marketplace for whom your product delivers worth.
- Plots type across the unaddressed wants, issues, and needs held by the characters in your market.
- Resolutions are the optimistic outcomes your product permits characters to understand in opposition to their wants, issues, and needs.
- The Golden Thread is the unifying theme throughout your system of synergistic, outcome-driven tales. The golden thread is what ties your product technique to the mission you established in your narrative.
Let’s discover this plot with the next characters:
“Mother and father need to share protected leisure experiences with their household.”
– Story/Consequence 1: improve child and family-friendly content material
– Story/Consequence 2: enhance family-friendly content material discoverability
– Story/Consequence 3: develop parental controls
– Golden Thread: present households the very best and most secure leisure platform
And what if we categorical our outcome-oriented technique by way of the customers selection of our product sooner or later:
“I exploit [entertainment platform] as a result of it offers the very best and most secure leisure for households.”
This framing is highly effective as a result of it forces the storyteller to externalize the influence of strategic outcomes on customers’ product desire. It brings ahead the idea of desirability for nearer examination.
I all the time counsel that product managers and product leaders get a agency grip on the weather of the Product Narrative Canvas earlier than specializing in technique storytelling. These components should be in place to ascertain context and create leverage. This could completely be achieved collaboratively with senior enterprise stakeholders.
With the narrative components in place, you’ll be able to transfer on to growing framing for strategic outcomes by way of the characters (personas) concerned and the plots (unmet wants/needs/issues) they face.
It should all the time be essential to tailor your strategic tales to your distinctive product and market. Equally, it’s cheap to tailor product technique discussions based mostly on the viewers and the quantity of context they have already got. For instance — a method dialogue with a seasoned engineer will most certainly be fairly completely different than with a brand new consumer or prospect.
Efficiently articulating this context typically takes just a few phrases or sentences, however it may possibly make an unlimited distinction in your viewers.
Don’t overlook to focus on key synergies between the outcomes you’re pursuing and/or the sources you propose to deploy. I want you the very best with crafting the very best tales to make sure product technique success.
