Storytelling Can Be Your Superpower

This presentation was given as part of SLC Design Week in 2021

This story is about you.

I'll share my experience and the experience of others,

but make no mistake; this story is about you

So I'd like you to consider some of the challenges you face on any given day.

You'll have product problems

People problems.

If you're anything like me and you have dogs...

You may have many problems.

;)

You're bound to have days like this....

You know, you're jumping from one worm-hole to the other and you fall into a massive crack in the earths crust..

These are Tiny Mario days ;(

We all have these days

They're difficult and without the right tools or even superpowers.

Obstacles are more challenging

It's my goal to help you understand...

Storytelling can be your superpower

And with storytelling, you can have fewer Tiny Mario days and more Fire Mario days

Here's an overview of the agenda

We'll start with WHY and cover the power of story

I imagine each of us have an affinity for storytelling.

It's human nature.

But why?

You might be familiar with Yuval Harari

In his research, Yuval has asked the question:

Why do humans run the world?

The long story short, and it is quite a long story...

It's because of our unique ability to cooperate flexibly and in large numbers.

Turns out Bees can cooperate in large numbers but not flexibly

Chimps can cooperate flexibly but not in large numbers.

So, why is it that we as humans are capable of this?

Yuval argues.. it's our imagination.

Our unique ability to create and believe fictional stories

Fictional stories can come in many different shapes and sizes.

Consider this fictional story

This green piece of paper has no objective value.

By itself, it doesn't keep you warm. You can't eat it.

The value of money is in our collective imagination to believe the story

and it turns out...

Yuval suggests..

Money is the most successful story created

because it is the only story everybody believes.

This is a slide from a talk by Pauls Adams, SVP Product at Intercom

Titled: The End of Naval Gazing

He mentions all of these UX / Product Design terms and methodologies

and guess what?

These are not objective realities

They are tools that enable us to cooperate flexibly and in large numbers.

They are stories.

and...

If you and I believe it, it actually works.

It should also be said,

if I believe in Jobs to be Done

but others in my organization don't

or they don't understand the story

That's not going to work

and you're setting yourself up for a Tiny Mario day

So, how do we create a story people can believe?

I'm willing to throw out some ideas

We all know that every good story starts with some good ol' fashion conflict.

Conflict is anytime a character confronts an obstacle

Rather than telling you how to shape a story, I'm going to provide an example

At the beginning of March 2020, RainFocus was a physical event management platform.

Our clients would use our admin tool to create what they needed to manage their physical event

Little did we know, we'd face its biggest obstacle yet.

Covid-19

100% of our revenue disappeared in 3 weeks.

Practically overnight the entire world stopped getting together in person for live events.

but it's in the face of danger that good stories become great

and we learn about the characters of the story

and how they bring conflict to resolution.

In my opinion, this is the meat and potatoes of shaping a story.

I'm convinced each of us need a set of principles that help us make decisions that shape our stories.

At RainFocus, we've established a number of product principles that define our character and how we respond to problems

I'd like to share 3 of them with you today.

#1 Go and See

This is a principle that we stole from Toyota they established in 2001.

For them, when a problem arose,

they would go and see it in person, for themselves.

For us, with the new Covid restrictions. Our model had to change from physical events to virtual.

We needed to Go and Experience a virtual event for yourself.

And that's what we did.

We created our first virtual user conference with the technology we could put together over the summer

We experienced the event for ourselves,

After the event we got as many stakeholders as we could get into one LucidSpark doc

and took notes.

Many notes.

All of this feedback was aimed at what we could do to make the next event better.

If we zoom in closer on the big orange cluster in the middle

You can see, Content Curation / Content Discovery

was the category that we received the most feedback about.

It ended up being a major focus for us as part of our attendees virtual experience.

Go and See

That's principle #1

#2 Outcomes Over Output

This has become one of my favorite principles I've dug into over the last year.

Before we get too far, a little context:

An output is the work being done by a person or a team

The screenshot of our first virtual event is an output

The affinity map I just showed on the slide before is an output.

Outcomes are what you want to achieve

It's a measurable result that can describe what success looks like.

One of my favorite examples of this just so happens to be a Mario reference

Let's say you are Tiny Mario

and this case study (the output) is the flower.

You taking something away from this that makes you a better designer (Fire Mario)

is the outcome I'm hoping for.

After some new found empathy.

We defined success outcomes for Attendees

This is one example

At RainFocus, success is more registered attendees to consume event content.

The more attendees who get value out of the event, the better it is for our business.

Our leading indicator of success is not revenue but

the % of registered attendees who view at least 1 session.

We're confident that if we can increase attendee engagement and sessions viewed

revenue will follow.

#3

Think Big and Start Small

With our clients hosting virtual events

it meant that we've become

Wix or SquareSpace for large enterprise events

That might be a little simplified

but the idea is that our clients build their event with our product

This is a wireframe we put together to show a big idea for what we could build next.

We figured, if we wanted more attendees to consume content

why not put it front and center with the ability to change the channel depending on your interests?

Also, as you scroll down

We have lists of curated sessions like Next up and Most popular

and custom layouts for announcements.

All of these where root problems we discovered from our first user conference about content discovery and content curation.

So here we are,

the story is taking shape

We're thinking big but where do we start?

This leads us to the most important step in creating a story people can believe

As we're exploring this intersection between product design and storytelling

The question I considered here was...

How do the best storytellers in the world collect feedback and refine their stories?

To answer this, I turned to Pixar

The Braintrust is a group of people who are willing to level with you

The purpose of the Braintrust is to push toward excellence and root out mediocrity.

It's easy to shape a mediocre story on your own.

Stories become great when they're challenged and tested

Ingredients for a successful Braintrust are

Frank talk, spirited debate, laughter, and love

I've used this framework with my UX team, my development team, and executives and C suite groups

Here's what you do, it's simple.

You get the group together and you tell them the story that's taking shape.

Then, ask for feedback that serves a common goal:

Help each other create a better story

Let that be our goal.

Each time I've done this and established this mindset of honesty and candor

it has proven to make my stories better.

As one iteration follows another

The mediocre story we started with becomes something we can all believe in.

It becomes good design.

It solves problems and meets goals.

Which leads us to our final chapter.

You might think this is a typo, right?

"You probably meant 'telling' the story, huh?"

But no, it's right

For me, selling has kinda felt like I'm biasing or even manipulating

but manipulation is convincing someone that the truth isn't what it seems.

If you’re confident in your product principles,

and you better be,

you need to pass that confidence along to the client.

Our job as designers is to present a solution to a business problem as an advocate for end users.

As we presenting our solution, our clients need to know 3 things:

It's conflict and resolution.

It's the story about how you came to this solution.

Explain the choices you made and why you made them.

For our RainFocus clients it means telling them #1 We've gone and seen

#2 We're making decisions to meet their goals

#3 We've tested our designs and know where to start.

Ultimately, your job is to help the client feel confident in the design.

This is the design we're using for our next user conference in February

I've got to give credit to our Creative team for putting this look and feel together.

I also want to mention that since last year

we have seen a 31% increase registered attendees who view at least 1 session

As we wrap things up,

I'd like to remind you...

This story is about you

Believe in yourself and your team.

Some of the stories we tell ourselves can be destructive.

Have confidence that we're doing our best to make the world a better place.