Why you need a Product Story, and how to craft it
***The goal of this article is to help product managers and designers to gain a new tool that can help them craft winning products***
I like to call it the biggest discovery in psychology since Sigmund Freud’s discovery of subconsciousness. Just like the notion of subconsciousness led to a better understanding of human motivations and influenced everything from social sciences to the financial world, this discovery should completely alter the way we communicate meaning. I am talking about the discovery of the Neural Story Net (horrible name, I know) — the basic wiring that stores all external information we process in our long-term memory.
As proven by a vast body of research conducted during the last 10–15 years, stories “speak” directly to the basic wiring of our brains. They flood our minds with important engagement-related hormones, make our brain waves sync, and push us to act.
[I’ll elaborate on the on this and other research findings in future posts. You are welcomed to “follow” along]
As I wrote in my previous article (which also addresses the role of stories in successful products), the most interesting finding here is that our brains are the ones creating the stories. That’s right — our brains actually create stories in order to store information in our long-term memory. And if information or experiences can’t fit into this structure, we lose the memory of them.
In today’s business world, stories are mainly applied in marketing (content, brand strategy, pitching, customer journey, etc.). However, from my perspective, stories are also relevant to products. And after working with a wide range of companies, I’ve found that products that don’t evoke a coherent story in the mind of their users fail to retain them.
But don’t take my word for it, try and review the following story parameters while thinking about your favorite products.
Longline (Hollywood story format) as an example
The Longline is a Hollywood story pitching format consisting of micro-stories that are intended to sell movies to producers. Let’s inspect its components and see how they can be useful to us when telling a Product Story.
1. The hero and his/her goal — The hero of a Product Story is always the user/client(!), and his/her journey has to be fully understood in order to develop a product. What is the main mission our user is trying to achieve? We need to answer this question in order to develop a story.
The mission can be something as simple as helping them get home on time, or as big as achieving a proper work/life balance.
* You should be careful with attempting to address too big of a mission, especially if you are working on creating an MVP for an early-stage startup. See below the parameters for examples.
2. The obstacles [the Nemesis] — Each product has to fight against something that the user dislikes, and the product should make a clear stand against those obstacles.
I personally prefer to see this parameter in a single form and focus on a single obstacle I call ‘the Nemesis.’ This is because the Nemesis is similar to the notion of pain that new products should always tackle.
The nemesis can be an internal enemy of your audience, such as not being efficient enough at work (and then the product should provide a clear leap in efficiency). Or, it can be an external one, such as an inability of competing products to provide a good solution in a certain field (then the core of this product should focus on the differentiating features).
* The Nemesis is the sole focus of your product — a fight with him should be in the core of all features released, at least at the MVP stage.
3. The transformation — This is the thing your product helps the hero to achieve. The more dramatic the transformation is to the user, the bigger the perceived value of your product.
The notion of transformation emphasizes that the value shouldn’t just focus on the removal of the Nemesis, but on the much larger mission of transforming the user.
Longline parameters in Twitter’s early product (reverse engineering)
I find that the easiest way to reverse-engineer a story is to start with the Nemesis. So, what was the Nemesis Twitter’s product tackled, with its unique 140 characters limitation? I believe it was those long posts on other social networks and content sites that demanded way too much time and concentration for our ADD generation.
Then the Hero will be the person who is easily annoyed by these long posts — anyone who feels bombarded by the endless flow of information. Especially working professionals who are more rigorous with their time.
As to the Transformation, I believe that Twitter allows its users to transform into sharp talkers who gain the appreciation and praise of their followers (through “star” or “retweet” buttons).
Secondary hero
Keep in mind that when you have more than one type of stakeholder that is using the product, you need to build a Product Story for each of them. Let’s explore this notion through an example, from the B2B domain this time, of a performance-tracking software of some sort:
Let’s say that besides your main Hero (analyst) you have a manager who receives reports from your software.
– Her Goal can be to impress her own managers by keeping them aware of the work that is being done in the department.
– Her Nemesis can be the time-consuming preparation of reports, something she hates because it takes her away from the day-to-day work.
– And her Transformation, with the help of your product, can be into an amazing reporter, because the product allows single-click report generation.
Additional features of this product should probably include easy and intuitive sharing and automatic addition of the manager’s name on top of this report.
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That’s it for now. Please try to work with these story creation parameters on your products and see if they help you to better understand and shape products. I’d love to hear about how it works for you. If you have any comments, questions, or thoughts, please share them with me here or send them to my email: [email protected]. I will try to implement your insights in future posts and in my workshops.