1) ACTIVATE: Product Narratives and Storytelling

In the ACTIVATE stage of product strategy integration, a product manager’s objective is to empower their product development team partners by thoroughly contextualizing the product mission.

In this stage, it’s critical that everyone become aligned on the biggest “why” questions and the outcomes that matter most to the success of the mission. A common and thorough understanding of product strategy enables the whole product development team to effectively interpret and apply product strategy within each of their respective disciplines. Product development team roles may include: product management, engineering, design, data science, various "ops" roles, and more.

This section of the e-book will cover strategy narrative and storytelling techniques, outcome-driven and objective-aligned roadmaps, roadmap timing, and measurement concepts.

A well-articulated product strategy has the power to motivate, inspire, and even sell. 

Product managers have the privilege and leading responsibility to educate partners and collaborators on the key points of product strategy at all stages of a product’s life.

When it comes to discussing and evangelizing product strategy, proper framing and delivery is critical for knowledge transmission and audience engagement. Product managers are intuitively drawn to the construct of a story when they are thinking about conveying product strategy. After all, doesn’t a good story make the message more relatable and compelling?

A product strategy has the unique challenge of serving both its organization’s interests and user/market interests simultaneously. By their nature, product strategies are conceptually dense and require tons of supporting context. The challenge of articulating a product strategy well shouldn’t be taken for granted.

If you’re a product manager with some experience, you probably already know how easy it is to debilitate a product strategy discussion with poor framing and convoluted explanations. You might have experienced how unsettling it can be when a client or stakeholder “isn’t getting it” and launches a series of pointed, derailing questions. If not, then surely you’ve seen someone bomb on Shark Tank.

Even the most brilliant strategies aren’t going to articulate themselves; they too require (and deserve!) well-crafted articulation. It goes without saying that one of the most important skills for a product manager to develop, and one that is critical for career advancement, is the art of presenting product strategy.

Over the years, I’ve found that the magic formula for high-impact product strategy presentation is to utilize a [product narrative] + [system of stories] approach.

You might be wondering: “how is a narrative different from stories?” and “what is a system of stories?”. Let’s address those important questions:

A good story has characters with motivations driving them to action, a plot, events transpiring, and a resolution. By contrast, a narrative is a contextual container for a system of stories. (Credit: Tamsen Webster for these definitions)

“System of stories” in a product strategy context refers to the idea that a product strategy typically reflects a plan to pursue more than just one strategic outcome. Each outcome can be told as its own story. The synergy between these stories reflects a higher level of strategy that ties directly to the organizational mission.

While storytelling techniques will bring product strategies to life in the most relatable and engaging way, an overarching product narrative creates leverage by supplying critical “bigger picture” context.

More practically, establishing a product narrative reduces the need to pause and explain background details about specific points of strategy. This improves conversational flow, maintains audience engagement, and creates more powerful “ah ha!” moments.

Let’s explore the [product narrative] + [system of stories] concepts in more detail:

Narratives

I developed the Product Narrative Canvas as a guide to capturing the essential points of context to support product strategy storytelling:

The Product Narrative Canvas is inspired by the popular business model and product positioning canvases, but it is adapted to support what product leaders spend far more time on: evangelizing product strategy. 

A product narrative captures several higher-order concepts and unifying themes about your organization. While product strategies will evolve and need to be re-told periodically, the broader product narrative will remain constant. And where product strategies typically have a 6-12 month time horizon, a product narrative is open-ended and should remain relevant for many years.

What’s the secret sauce here? It’s understanding that high-impact strategy storytelling needs to establish credibility while appealing to logic and emotion. Note how the six input elements of the Product Narrative Canvas address above speak to one or a combination of credibility, logic, and emotion.

In addition to the specific prompts included in the canvas, I would encourage product managers to consider two more questions:

“Why us?” as an extension of organizational positioning (as opposed to any other organization) 

and 

“Why now?” as an extension of the market level challenge and unique insights 

The following is an example of the product narrative canvas for a hypothetical custom ski boot fitter based in Salt Lake City, Utah, serving local and traveling skiers who seek to maximize their enjoyment on The Greatest Snow on Earth.

Position your organization - ethos, passion, and competency

“We are a 3rd generation cobbler and podiatrist and are lifelong mountain sports enthusiasts. We are passionate about helping people reach flow state nirvana in their human-powered missions” 

Articulate the “existential” problem - impact, urgency, and pervasiveness 

“There is a problem in the market today…”

“Skiing is a feet-up activity. The modern ski boot utilizes a rigid shell with extremely small tolerances for optimal fit and performance. There are over 7 billion unique pairs of feet and corresponding biomechanics on earth, but only a dozen quality ski boot lines. Unsurprisingly, the fitment of ski boots is the single largest equipment-based failure point in the ski experience.” 

Portray your vision - the fully realized, value-added, end state of your product

“We envision a world where the interface between a person and their skis is invisible. A world in which the ski is a completely natural and perfectly responsive extension of the body.”

Convey unique insights and truths held - intelligence, convictions, worldview

Consider: do you have an "earned secret"?

“Our research has found that optimized ski boot fitment reduces the injury rate by 50% and the dropout rate by 65%. Additionally, skiers universally declare “good” ski boot fitment to increase both performance and enjoyment. Ski boot fitment is the single largest contributor to skiing success.”

Declare your mission - direction, goals, guiding principles

Consider: do you have an "unfair advantage"?

“Equipment should elevate the journey. Our mission is to provide skiers with optimized ski boot-based solutions leveraging a unique combination of experience, expertise, craftsmanship, and personalization.” 

Position your product - For [target customers] who need [solutions/benefits/outcomes], [your product name] is a [product category] that [benefit/reason to buy]. Unlike [competitors/alternatives] our product [differentiation statement].

Consider: is this product a vitamin, a painkiller, a candy, or a cure?

"For skiers who seek to elevate their experience and maximize their skiing potential, Lofted Sports is a custom boot fitter who will adapt a top quality ski boot to your exacting anatomical needs with the highest level of precision. Unlike big retail stores that offer minimal customization and experience, Lofted Sports combines lifetimes of experience with the highest end tooling, unparalleled craftsmanship, and a lifetime workmanship guarantee to create idealized ski boot solutions."

The elements of a product narrative are equally at home in a pitch deck for prospects or investors as they are in conversations with a cross-functional product development team. They should be an aligning, inspiring, and motivating force internally within an organization.

Storytelling

When it comes to strategy storytelling, the first and most important principle is to be outcome-oriented (more on this below).

Keeping it “outcome-level” elevates the conversation to matters of “why” and leaves room for the best solutions to be discovered and optimized over time. You’ve read this point from every product and business management thought leader ever so I won’t elaborate but simply remind: don’t be feature (output) led!

As mentioned earlier, a good outcome-driven story has characters with motivations driving them to action, a plot, and a resolution. Great product storytelling should leverage the same constructs. Here’s how those story constructs relate to product strategies:

Characters are the personas in your target market for whom your product delivers value.

Plots form around the unaddressed needs, problems, and desires held by the characters in your market.

Resolutions are the positive outcomes your product enables characters to realize against their needs, problems, and desires.

The “Golden Thread” is the unifying theme across your system of synergistic, outcome-driven stories. The golden thread is what ties your product strategy to the mission you established in your product narrative.

For example:

Characters/plot: parents want to share safe entertainment experiences with their family

Story/Outcome 1: increase kid and family-friendly content

Story/Outcome 2: improve family-friendly content discoverability

Story/Outcome 3: expand parental controls

Golden Thread:  provide families the best and safest entertainment platform

Storytelling and roadmaps

Now that we understand the high-level framework for narratives and storytelling, we can continue to the finer points of outcome-oriented and objective-aligned roadmapping.

To set a baseline for these tactics, I want to reiterate one ultra-critical point about roadmap development: it’s not a feature delivery plan; don’t forsake the “why” (outcomes) for the “what” (features), or even worse, the “how much” (output).

With that said, describing product initiatives and their goals by the outcomes you are seeking (story endings) is an ideal way to capture and communicate the top-level concepts that are the building blocks of a great roadmap. Additionally, organizing your roadmap (or a version of it) by the business objectives it supports is a powerful tactic for achieving alignment, trust, and confidence with your senior executive stakeholders.

Let’s explore outcome-oriented and objective-organized roadmaps further:

Being "outcome-driven"

Before we dive in to roadmapping, it's important to understand that there are three types of outcomes that product development teams should be thoroughly mindful of: customer outcomes, product outcomes, and business outcomes.

A customer outcome is experienced by users. It typically involves progress towards jobs to be done and/or unmet needs, desires, and problems. When delivered by your product, they are enablers of product outcomes. Customer outcomes are identified and achieved by an empowered product development team.

A product outcome captures a change in users or user behavior with the product. It is typically measured by adoption, utilization, or engagement. It may also include sentiment metrics. Product outcomes are leading indicators of business outcomes. Desired product outcomes are set collaboratively with business executives based on insights and predictions about which users/user behavior can and should be changed, thereby driving desired business outcomes. Empowered product development teams own product outcomes.

Business outcomes are experienced within the business. They are measured by business metrics like revenue, profit, market share, and churn. Business outcomes are lagging indicators. They are defined and owned by business executives.

The value proposition of a product is what compels a customer to use that product (rather than achieve their outcomes some other way), and it's what allows customer outcomes to drive product outcomes.

Similarly, the business model of a product is what transforms product outcomes into business outcomes.

Outcome-driven Roadmaps

A customer outcome is a measurable result that is expressed in terms of user needs and behavior.

It is true that in the real world of managing a product, some non-user oriented architectural, UX, and product support needs (and associated debt) may need to be addressed on their own merits from time to time, particularly as a product evolves and scales. When these needs are significant enough, they may require their own place on your roadmap. These needs can be thought of as enablers or sustainers to product outcomes alongside customer outcomes.

Nonetheless, the primary focus of any roadmap should be on user-centric outcomes.

Outcome descriptions should be concise, and they should clearly convey added value for users. The future state can be expressed as a user-realized benefit, state, or result.  Here’s a great way to format your outcome descriptions:

Action verbs can be words like: “accelerate”, “improve”, “streamline”, “reduce”, and “optimize”. Words like “implement” and “support” are ok as long as the outcome described is solution agnostic.

As a reminder, we want to avoid “feature-speak” in our roadmaps. Using “support” as the action verb followed by a feature description will get you flagged by the roadmap police!

User needs-based themes can be used to group related or interdependent outcomes and to support storytelling. A theme-based roadmap could look like this:

Themes may also be framed as key “focus” or “investment” areas, but you should not lose the context of user and/or market needs.

You may certainly tweak this visual format to need and taste. Otherwise, this construct will result in a roadmap that very naturally lends to storytelling about customer outcomes.

“Keeping it outcome level” democratizes for any audience what might otherwise be a too abstract or too detailed discussion about your product strategy. A focus on outcomes elevates a conversation about the product roadmap to matters of “why”, and leaves room for product development teams to discover and iterate on the best solutions.

Objective-organized roadmaps

While outcomes do a great job of conveying initiatives and their goals, if you went out to lunch with any passionate product manager, they could probably give you a list of fifty aspirational outcomes for their product before their food arrives. I know my lists would be longer than the Cheesecake Factory menu.

The right list of outcomes is informed by user value impacts, but it’s also governed by your organization's key business objectives and steered by the business model of the product. So, it is essential to be able to relate those outcomes to, and to prioritize against, your business objectives.

Marcus Hamrin developed a four quadrant model to describe the four types of value that product initiatives can create for an organization: Create New Value | Protect Value | Avoid Loss | Decrease Loss.

Along similar lines, the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched thoughtfully explains that all business objectives can be mapped to a set of universal objectives:

By all means, adapt to your organization’s objectives as needed, but the above list works well as-is.

Validating stakeholder alignment is a top-of-mind consideration for product managers. A great starting point for any product team’s roadmapping exercise is to explicitly organize those themes and outcomes by the business objectives they support:

While this type of organization is probably not appropriate for a user-facing roadmap, it can be highly effective in driving alignment and soliciting the right kind of feedback from an audience of senior executives and other key stakeholders - particularly those who aren’t as steeped in the technology and/or the particulars of your product. It’s also a great starting point from which the other variations of your roadmap for different audiences can be derived.

A focus on outcomes with clear ties back to business objectives will strengthen the conceptual tie between strategy and execution for everyone in your organization. It will also build confidence and trust along the way.

Just like a great product, a well formed roadmap should seem “obvious” in retrospect. 

Timing

We’ve established that a roadmap is not a delivery plan. However, it’s not unreasonable to expect, and to want to provide, some sense of timing for when outcomes will be realized. The timing of delivery for certain outcomes may well be a crucial point of overall product strategy.

In the same way that product development teams think about estimating the complexity and associated “unknowns risk” of work on a relative basis, the implied timing of roadmap outcomes can be portrayed on a relative basis. A common format for roadmap-level relative timing is Now > Next > Future:

You may consider providing more timing specificity for the most immediate timeframe of, say, one to three months. On this time horizon, the product development initiatives driving key outcomes are typically imminent or in their final stages where most of the build-related unknowns have been realized and therefore delivery predictability is greatest.

Another tactic for setting timing related expectations can be to provide information about the life stage of an initiative. Life stages might include Research > Proof of Concept > Alpha > Beta > Refinement > V1 Production > V2 Iterations > etc.

Be sure to adapt roadmap timing implications collaboratively with product development teams using experience-driven and evidence-based scientific methods. Above all, product development teams must feel confident in delivering on the timing implications of a roadmap.

The topics of complexity, risk, and predictability are discussed in more depth in Part 3.

For further reading and more detailed examples of outcome oriented and objective organized roadmaps, see the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched and these articles by: Michael Goff, Jason Doherty, and Elena Sviridenko. 

A final note on OKRs and KPIs:

Developing an objective-organized and outcome-oriented roadmap naturally aligns with the popular management construct "OKRs" (objectives and key results). In fact, a good roadmap could be thought of as a charted view of your product’s OKRs.

Just like a roadmap, product OKR’s are typically forward-looking for a set time period and evolve on the same cadence. They serve to measure progress in business-meaningful ways. The “key result” component of an OKR provides the target measurement benchmark for the outcome or set of outcomes.

However, it should be emphasized that OKR's themselves are not a product strategy. They are simply a measurement compliment to the collection of synergistic, customer-centric outcomes that constitute the coherent, actionable strategy a product development team may own.

By contrast to OKRs, product KPI’s (key performance indicators) are typically dictated by the finer points of a product's implementation. They serve to measure performance on an on-going basis. For that reason, product KPIs are a better fit to the bottom-up product concepts that are formulated during execution phases. More to come in Part 3!