Use the vision storyboard to keep the product team aligned and focused — Part 1
TL;DR: It’s not easy to communicate your product vision with your team and leadership, and it’s even harder to get the team aligned on the vision and hope they can refer to it while making product decisions. In this article, I will share how I use storytelling to communicate product vision, keeping the team aligned and focused.
Let’s meet Mei, a product designer working on a fantastic SaaS product.
Like other product designers, she creates her design strategy with vision, strategy and hypothesis.
Everything goes well until she presents her strategy to the leadership group and her teammates.
The leadership group feels there is too much detail in the presentation, and it easily gets into the weeds rather than focusing on high-level design strategy. What wasn’t captured was the real gap between the user problem and the future vision.
On the product team side, everyone seems aligned. However, they’re all thinking about the execution detail differently, which leads to anxious last minus re-alignment meetings and potential rework.
Mei feels frustrated. She wants to learn how to present user problems better, so the audience can grasp the user problem easily She always wants to present the future vision in such a way there is no room for misalignment.
How can Mei accomplish this? Storytelling! There are two promises storytelling can offer. It explains the user problem vividly. For example, who doesn’t understand comic books? Even a kid can read it. Storytelling can also help visualize the future more tangibly, leaving little room for misalignment.
If we look around the industry, many companies already use storytelling. In this video, Jared shared his idea of product vision. It’s a “Flag in the sand.”
Apple’s vision video about the Knowledge Navigator (1987) inspired the iPad product line 23 years later. The Knowledge Navigator is not technically possible even in today’s standard, but it’s all about describing the experience.
It’s critical to provide context. Airbnb is famous for using storytelling to map out the entire customer journey, even before and after using Airbnb. As you see in the canvas below, this added context makes it even more believable.
With all the hype up, I hope you have bought into the idea of storytelling. You need to create two types of stories: a problem story and a vision story. In the next article, I will show you how to create a problem story and a vision story step by step.
