Storytelling Through Product Management Frameworks

By Sam Bobo

The Lean Canvas Model, Experience-Based Roadmap, Outcome-Based Roadmap, Prioritization Matrix… BINGO!! I CALL BINGO!! While the names of Product Management frameworks are often thrown around as jargon, these models are often critical for the success of Product Managers.

The Product Management craft, for me, centers around entrepreneurship. Prior to working at TribalScale, I worked as a Relationship Manager where my primary responsibility was consulting CEOs and CTOs of major technology start-ups on integrating artificial intelligence (A.I.) into existing products or building new innovative offerings. My interactions with these visionaries opened my eyes to the sheer passion, excitement, and energy for innovation and desire to solve problems faced by users in creative ways. I channeled this excitement and formally pursued training in Product Management. I quickly realized that being a PM, essentially, meant being the CEO of the product.

Defining the overall strategy, roadmap, and execution for a product from a blank canvas can be a daunting task. Communicating the associated value a product brings to a specific set of users in a succinct manner is even more challenging. Yet, these two components — defining strategy and communicating value — must work in harmony for a product to be successful. The aforementioned frameworks assist Product Managers in distilling core product and market assumptions into key components. Putting all the components together to compose a meaningful story is where the magic happens, which is why I am here to help!

Storytelling is a critical skill for Product Managers with a variety of applications, including gaining stakeholder buy-in, reaching prospective users, and inspiring teams to work towards a meaningful vision. Throughout this blog, we will construct the foundation for building a narrative about a fictitious cupcake factory: Castle Cupcakes (for engineers interested in learning how to use Apache Kafka, the eCupcakesFactoryOnContainers is a reference implementation for .Net developers to get started with containerized microservices using .Net Core and Kafka).

After reading this blog, you will be equipped with the building blocks, i.e.: the core PM frameworks, needed to formulate impactful product narratives.

Define A Product’s Vision Statement

A product’s vision statement is the carefully crafted sentence that anchors all product-related decisions, and articulates the high-level goal of the product. The goal of the product will ultimately be to solve a particular problem (or series of problems) the users have. Product Managers should spend a considerable amount of time identifying the problem and empathizing with users before crafting the vision statement. This vision should be inspirational, address the overall value for users, and align the entire team.

Vision statements are not crafted in isolation. For structured organizations (e.g matrixed, divisional), business units are responsible for maintaining and achieving higher-level business outcomes, which cascade upward to fit into the company’s vision and mission. When crafting the language around a product vision statement, Product Managers should take their department-level goals into consideration and ensure the product’s vision helps reach the department’s long-term objectives.

Let’s explore Castle Cupcakes! For background, Castle Cupcakes is a cupcakery that specializes in upscale cupcakes. Castle Cupcake’s value statement is “a delight in every bite” and aims to deliver unique experiences with each cupcake produced. Srini, the company’s CEO, is looking for innovative ideas to grow the cupcake business beyond its local market and outperform its competitor: Crusty Cakes. With this goal in mind, our Product Manager analyzed the market and saw an opportunity in the “build your own cupcakes” market, one that has not been explored by local competitors; our PM underwent design thinking exercises to understand cupcake lovers. Throughout the process, our PM discovered that cupcake lovers wished to deviate from the traditional and sought a cupcakery that can deliver unique treats that evolves with their changing tastes. After brainstorming, our PM crafted the vision statement for his new product: “Explore customers’ unique personalities to build a cupcake that puts “them” on a plate.”

Create Meaningful Experiences

With a new vision statement created, we can now define the experiences that will comprise our solution. The world is changing, and it’s time to embrace experiences; it’s not just a Millennial thing! In Agile Product Management, focusing on the user means creating delightful experiences each and every time the product or service is delivered into production. However, identifying the starting point can be difficult.

Start with the Minimal Viable Product (MVP). The MVP, as defined by “The Lean Start-Up” is “that vision of a new product a team uses to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort.” One can also view the MVP from a different perspective: A Minimally Delightful Experience. These concepts can be illustrated via a cake building metaphor:

1. Start first with a cupcake (coincidence?),
2. Then a birthday cake; and finally,
3. A wedding cake

Each variation delivers a delightful experience, while increasing in complexity.

Experiences are defined by answering the following questions: Who? What? Wow? “Who” describes the end-user of our product. “What” states the capability that can be achieved, and “wow” is the differentiator, what is our competitive advantage in the market? So experiences sound similar to the structure of user stories, am I reading this right? Yes! This is no coincidence! These experiences map directly to Epics that a Product Manager would populate on a backlog. Therefore, user stories will be attached to these Experiences (Epics) to be executed by the development team.

So let’s define the experience that will encompass our MVP: “As an enthusiastic cupcake lover, can I get a gourmet custom cupcake delivered in record time.”

Design A Winning Strategy

Thus far, we have defined the product vision and the experience that will serve as our MVP. These are the two end-points that our story will comprise of (more on that later). Time to fill in the middle and design a winning strategy.

Product strategies are essential for success in the market. Strategies should take the form of achievable objectives that will highlight the user, create differentiation amongst competitors, and augment competitive advantage. A valuable tool for building winning product strategies is the Business Model Canvas. The Business Model Canvas is an actionable, entrepreneur-focused, 1-page business plan template that aims to deconstruct a product’s definition into its key assumptions. Inside the body of the Business Model Canvas, a Product Manager defines the target user, states the problem, identifies possible solutions, and articulates the unique value proposition; each of these define what is being built. Next, sales channels, revenue streams, cost drivers, and key metrics are broken down to encapsulate the business viability of the product. Finally, the unfair advantage is highlighted, which helps focus the strategy.

Unfair advantage (a.k.a competitive advantage) differentiates companies among their competitors in the market. Established organizations continue to fuel their competitive advantage to increase barriers to entry for competitors; effective strategies seek to extend those advantages by providing differentiated value in products that solve customer problems in the most efficient and frictionless way.

Let’s return to Castle Cupcakes. Our PM carefully selected three strategies that augmentCastle Cupcake’s advantage in the market and uniquely address the proposed solution:

1. Automate cupcake production with auto-scaling resources to meet current customer demand in time
2. Craft micro-experiences that provide a unique one-of-a-kind visit every time
3. Generate social virality to augment the brand’s presence

Derive Business Outcomes

Outcomes, by definition, describe the result of a particular action taken, whereby, outputs are the amount produced in a given time. Traditional ways of thinking about business outcomes center around outputs as they measure utilization and ensure that scare resources are used efficiently. This output-based mindset leads businesses to make decisions that value themselves over the user, which can generate a value gap and lead to uncaptured revenue that competitors can capitalize on. Agile teams, on the other hand, should focus on outcomes and on delivering value to users.

Outcomes are inherently the by-product of experiences that bring value to the business. An outcomes definition of the product takes three parts:

1. The Outcome Statement answers the question: what business value results from the user experiences?
2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) outline the metrics for success that will indicate whether an outcome was achieved.
3. Features outline the planned deliverables that bring about the experiences that will encompass the product solution (the ones previously defined).

At Castle Cupcakes, our Product Manager outlined one main outcome and metric:

Outcome: “Offer large quantities of cakes, frostings, and toppings without the expense of time.”

KPI: decrease time-to-delivery

Feature: Custom crafted cupcakes

Putting the Pieces Together

The Lean Canvas Model, Experience-Based Roadmap, Outcome Based Roadmap, Prioritization Matrix… these frameworks are not simply jargon thrown around by Product Managers to play PM Bingo. Rather, they are tools used to formulate a holistic strategy and subsequently aid storytelling efforts to communicate that strategy to stakeholders:

• Product visions are subsets of the department’s or company’s vision
• Strategies are created as methods to realize the product vision
• Outcomes address the business benefit gained, and
• Experiences fulfill user needs and provide differentiation that adds business value

Lastly, user stories create requirements for engineers to build components for the overall experience

Recall from my previous blog post, “Universal Product Language: User Stories” that user stories are written in a format that allows PMs to translate user value into the languages of respective stakeholders. Ultimately, our structure breaks down a product into user stories as the smallest piece; use this to your advantage as you begin storytelling.

Storytelling, now, becomes a flexible, bi-directional scripted framework, simplifying communications to customers, sales, stakeholders, executives, and more. Take a top-down approach to talk about the product holistically in the broader organizational strategy and market, or take a bottom-up approach to describe how a particular feature fits into the overall product vision as a solution for customers’ needs.

Start viewing PM frameworks in a new light, practice storytelling in this paradigm, and share your experiences below for others to read about!

For more information on project management frameworks, click here to speak to one of our experts.

Sam is passionate about empowering people to innovate, understand, and transform the world utilizing ground-breaking technology. Over the course of his career, he has consulted CEOs and CTOs from product design through implementation to revenue maximization. He seamlessly melds business acumen, technological know-how, and creative vision to identify, prioritize, and resolve his client’s most daunting problems to ensure their competitive edge in the marketplace. At TribalScale, Sam teaches Product Management to clients via one-to-one mentorship in the Transformation practice.

TribalScale is a global innovation firm that helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era. We transform teams and processes, build best-in-class digital products, and create disruptive startups. Learn more about us on our website. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook!