by Donna Lichaw
Here’s how a real-life interaction with a trainer and our internal improvisation (improv) sessions played out: imagine you want to start training. You join a gym and get assigned a trainer. When you meet with your trainer for the first time, she might ask you a series of questions so that she can determine your goals and fitness level. At that time, she will make sure to hit on your pain points so that you really know why you’re there (exposition).
Then she might affirm or adjust your goal and tell you that if you work with her, you can attain this goal (inciting incident). Next, you’ll do a series of exercises (rising action) where your trainer might purposely test your strength, endurance, or agility to see how far you can go. These exercises should be easy enough to partially complete (more rising action), but difficult enough so that you either find them physically strenuous by the end or cannot complete them (crisis). Fear not, the trainer tells you. If you stick with her, within a few weeks, you’ll be that much closer to running that 5K or easily doing 30 push-ups or whatever goal or obstacle you want to meet or overcome (climax). She might even show you a visualization that projects how well you will do if you stick with the plan and exercise a few times a week. At this point, you not only hear her words, but you also feel like you just did something and can see yourself coming back weekly to do this until you meet your big goal (falling action). The trainer gives you your 12-week plan, and you’re on your way (end).
Improvising and re-creating stories like these are how we engineered everything from on-boarding to customer service scripts to payment flows. Conversations, role-playing, and improv sessions aren’t just about two people talking and saying words aloud; they embody stories that resonate with people and get them that much closer to meeting a goal. If you try this kind of activity with your team, just remember to consider the story. Nothing is more boring for your customers than a conversation that doesn’t go anywhere.
Elevator Pitch
An elevator pitch is a short statement, sentence, or a few sentences you use to briefly describe a concept, product, or business. It’s called an “elevator pitch” because it should be short enough that you can give the pitch in the time it takes to ride in an elevator with someone. Elevator pitches are not just marketing or sales tools—they are a strategic tool you can use to make sure you are clear on a product or project’s objectives, market, and value to an intended audience. If you break the format of an elevator pitch down and consider it within the framework of a narrative, it is essentially a very short story.
You can use an elevator pitch to communicate your story to investors, stakeholders, customers, or team members in a fast, portable way that storymaps can’t help you do. If you’re at a cocktail party, meeting with investors, or simply want to get an idea across quickly and effectively, you won’t always be able to draw or show story arcs. But you can speak a few words and see how people respond. Just remember, your story architecture should flow through your elevator pitches so that they are that much stronger. Just like a short and sweet story, your elevator pitch must grab people’s interest, take them on a little journey, and make them see the value in what you’re talking about.
Elevator pitches for products and services come in different formats and generally function like this:
For [target customer] who has [customer need], [product name] is a [market category] that [one key benefit]. Unlike [competition], the product [unique differentiator].4
If you reverse engineer the format, you can see how this maps out onto and functions much like a concept story:
• Target customer = main character
• Customer need = inciting incident or problem
• Product name, category, one key benefit = rising action
• Competition = crisis and conflict
• Unique differentiator = climax, resolution, or what’s awesome
• And the falling action and end = this is how it all comes together: a customer should be able to use a product not only to get something done, but also to see the benefit and the value. Conflict overcome, crisis averted.
Putting It All Together
Once you’ve got a good idea of what your storylines can be, you’ll want to continue to weave them into everything from the actual physical or digital prototypes that you build to the way you present your work to how you test your products with your target market. Stories aren’t just something that should stay in your workplace or with your team—they eventually need to make it to the outside world. Weave them through everything you do related to creating a product, including pitching, presenting, and demonstrating your ideas.
Build and Communicate
Consider how story ultimately wove through the first iPhone. When Steve Jobs gave his keynote presentation in 2007 announcing the iPhone, he had a vision for the product, and knew how to weave that vision into everything from the design, the presentation, and even the prototype of the first iPhone. It turns out that the product he demonstrated that day to illustrate his point that Apple was reimagining the way we communicate wasn’t an actual functioning iPhone—it was a semi-functional prototype.5 As such, the device was essentially a prop that supported the overall vision and story as he walked the world through a series of smaller storylines that introduced features and functionality like the ability to pinch and zoom into a high-resolution photo or search for Starbucks on a map, call the store, and order 1,000 lattes.
“And here we are…boom!”
Those are the words that Steve Jobs used during his presentation to narrate how you search for and locate something in the Google Maps app on the first iPhone as he demonstrated the device onstage. As behind-the-scenes accounts now tell us, the prototype was only marginally functional; it could barely catch a Wi-Fi signal, make a phone call, or operate without crashing. And as owners of the first iPhones remember, the phone was not at all fully featured compared to other smartphones on the market. The Palm Treo, which was the best-selling smartphone the year before, not only had features like cut-and-paste, but it also let you install apps and games. The iPhone did neither. But what the iPhone and in particular the cobbled-together prototype that Jobs demonstrated did do was go “boom.” Just like a good story.
The perfectly timed “boom” during this demo and overall presentation was not a coincidence. In fact, it is just like that one plot point from the fourth season of Breaking Bad: BOOM (see Chapter 1, “Mapping the Story”). Only instead of actual explosions, the “boom” Jobs was narrating was a tiny animation that transpired when a pin dropped on a map (see Figure 7.9). This animation was so fast and tiny that if you weren’t looking for it, you missed it. But if you spent years working at Pixar or being forced to watch and analyze scenes and sequences over and over, you noticed it. And if you spend some time after reading this book looking for and analyzing sequences and flows like the one for adding a calendar event in Fantastical, you’ll start to notice them, too. Nothing is too small, fast, or insignificant to inject into a design or prototype as long as it supports the story. If the story is strong and compelling enough—like the ability to search anywhere on the globe using your phone, which was a revolutionary concept in 2007—you not only save that demo for last, but you also emphasize the story with narration. Just like Jobs did.
FIGURE 7.9
While the first iPhone didn’t have basic functionality like cut-and-paste, the pin-dropping animation was meticulously crafted for bounce and elasticity.
Prototyping, demonstrating, and presenting your work, whether you are a designer, developer, product manager, executive, or founder is essential for conveying why your product is great and for explaining how it works and why it matters. Plus, it’s essential for getting buy-in, whether it is from an internal sponsor team, clients, or the world audience.
At FitCounter, we wove our storylines into everything from research to design, to strategy and presentations, demonstrations, and even board and investor pitch decks. And it worked. Without a story, our customers and potential investors were c
onfused. With a story, they were excited. The great thing was that both investors and customers put their money where their mouths were. So much so that the actual start-up that the story is based on is doing great—they have a story and the revenue generation to show for it.
Again, this is not just film magic or some kind of smoke-and-mirrors illusion or sleight of hand. It’s good old story craft that is built for how humans interact with and understand the world around them. It works for the idea of a product, the actual product, and how you present that product to the world. It not only helps you sell your products, but it also makes them better, overall. More importantly, a story-first approach helps your customers have a better experience with that product. There is not enough magic in the world that can make humans unwittingly fake that on their end. Designing with story is designing for humans.
If you ever want to learn from the master of product stories, I recommend sitting down for an hour one day and watching that first iPhone keynote address from start to finish. In that presentation, you will see how someone uses story and story structure to build excitement about concepts and use cases. In the presentation, the iPhone isn’t the star—rather, you are the star as you envision all of the things that you could do with this device in your hand. As an origin story, this story ends with you eventually buying the device as many people did and continue to do around the world. More importantly, however, it ends with you having a new and better way to do what you didn’t realize you needed to do: communicate.
Was this presentation crafted with a clear overarching storyline and subplots? Absolutely. The best presentation experts in the world advocate using story architecture to bolster presentations. Was Steve Jobs aware of how powerful story structure could be when he demonstrated the smallest subplot or usage story for searching for and finding a location on a map? Undoubtedly. He spent years before going back to Apple working with Pixar—a bastion of visual storytelling and animation. As any filmmaker will tell you, everything you put in the scene must support the story.
While storytelling comes naturally to many of us, it is worthwhile to meticulously and carefully map out everything from how a prototype functions to how you ultimately present that prototype or a broader product idea to an audience. The better the story, the more engaging both your prototype and presentation will be.
Test and Validate
Stories are not just for building and communicating. They must resonate with your audience. Every step of the way, you must test your stories to make sure that you’re on track. Diagrams, storyboards, written words, pitches, improv, prototypes, demos, presentations—these are all artifacts and activities you can use to test your stories with your target audience to make sure that you’re on the right track.
How do you know you’re on the right track? First, once you start to use story more in your work, you’ll start to see when something is or isn’t a solid story. Then, when you start putting your ideas in front of people, you’ll start to get feedback. Maybe a story will or won’t resonate with someone. Maybe people will tell you when something doesn’t make sense to them. Maybe they’ll smile at just the right time during a usability or concept test, validating your hunch that the climax was what you thought it would be. And if all goes well, maybe even journalists will hear about your product, use your product, and unwittingly echo your story.
When a story is structurally sound, it flows through everything. It’s not only up to you to make sure that you engineer around the story, but also that the story resonates with and is echoed by the outside world.
CHAPTER 8
Rules of Thumb
Stories Are Character-Driven
Characters Are Goal-Driven
Goals Can Change
Goals Are Measurable
Conflict Is Key
Math Is Fun
Choose Your Own Adventure
Make Things Go Boom!
“The true writer is one for whom technique has become, as it is for the pianist, second nature.”
—John Gardner,
The Art of Fiction
A few years ago, I stormed into a CEO’s office and proudly proclaimed my sudden epiphany: “We have no story. We need a story!” I continued. “So...what’s the story?” This was the start-up that I have fictionalized as FitCounter in this book. Luckily, the CEO still talks to me today. But at that moment, he turned bright red and asked me to leave his office. Stories are powerful tools. When used well, they make things better. But use them carefully.
As I learned that day, no one likes being told that his product and something he’s worked for years to build has no story. What people do like are products that are successful, customers who are happy, and metrics that help board members sleep at night.
Once you start working with story, you will weave it into your practice in many ways, shapes, and forms. You will wield story like a mighty sword as you break away and rebuild how you hope people will think about and experience your products. But remember—swords can hurt. What eventually worked for this CEO and most of my clients and teams ever since is not telling, but showing. If you’re fixing something that’s broken, use story not just to show what is, but also what can be. And if you’re building something from scratch, use story to make some magic.
Here are some rules of thumb to guide you on your journey.
Stories Are Character-Driven
Remember, in the case of the stories you build, whether they are visual, verbal, analog, or digital, your main character must be the person on the other end, i.e., the person experiencing the story. Everything you want that person to experience must drive the story forward. If it doesn’t, you cut it out. Also remember that the characters in your stories are not fictional or hypothetical dream customers who don’t exist in real life. They are based on real people, real goals, real behaviors, and real stories. If you don’t have access to real people or real data, you can make it up—as long as you validate it later.
Characters Are Goal-Driven
It is your job to drive your character’s story forward. It is also your job to help that person meet his or her goal. There is nothing worse than a story with no purpose, whether it is for people in an audience watching a movie or for the people using your product. When crafting your story, make sure to move your character forward and to help him (and your business) meet some kind of goal.
Goals Can Change
Humans are fickle. In romantic comedies, the protagonist often starts out with a simple goal: to end up with the guy who is no good for her. Over time, she will probably learn that what she really needs to do is be with the nice guy. That said, what you want and what you need aren’t always obvious in the moment and that’s OK.
In 2006, people said that they wanted an iPod that made phone calls. In 2007, instead they got a new way to communicate. If you think you know what a character’s goal is, consider asking “why” as many times as you can until you uncover the real goal at the core of your story. You want an iPod that makes phone calls? Why? Because it would be convenient. Why? Because you only want to carry one device. Why?...and so forth.
Also know that while goals can change, characters won’t always know what their goal is until you uncover it for them. I have yet to meet someone who tells me that his goal is to communicate with the world around him. But I’ve worked on enough products where that is undoubtedly the main character’s goal. Sometimes, it’s your job to remind people and get them on the right track.
Goals Are Measurable
Imagining stories that help people meet their goals isn’t simply an exercise in creativity. Goals in the stories you create can and should be measured, both for your characters and your business. You can do this by measuring qualitatively (in-person conversations and observational studies) and quantitatively (surveys and analytics)—or using a combination of the two. You can measure actions, and you can measure sentiment, ideally both. Doing so requires measuring what people think and do, both of which are essential for stories to mo
ve forward and help characters meet their goals. Observing stories in action and measuring goal completion is how you know you’re on the right track.
Conflict Is Key
Once upon a time, there was a wooden doll named Pinocchio. He wanted to become a real human boy. So he went out, bought some magic, and transformed into a boy. The end.
Easy, right?
Of course not.
Stories wouldn’t be stories without conflict. They would be a series of events—stuff happening. Just as stuff happening doesn’t make for good stories, it definitely doesn’t make for engaging experiences.
Every character and every goal in a story should always have some kind of force working in opposition to it. Conflict makes everything that happens in a story more suspenseful and ultimately rewarding, whether you experience a story by watching it from the outside or by participating in the story, as you do when you engage with products and services.
Designing stories for conflict helps you determine what should happen next as you strive for balance between a character trying to attain a goal (or set of goals) and running into obstacles along the way. When building products around stories, it is not your job to place obstacles in the way, but instead to consider them and plan around them as you help your protagonist jump hurdles, have a smooth ride, and ultimately meet his and your business goals.
Math Is Fun
Here’s a formula you didn’t learn in math class. I use it all the time to make things better.