More than Words: A Vision

Think back to the last time you sat in on a product strategy meeting and wondered, “But what is success supposed to look like? How do we design against this?” In contrast to a dry and rudderless read-out, the product vision paints a picture of a future state that is compelling and actionable.

The product vision is the keystone that secures the bricks of our product strategy in place. It is the means we use to motivate the strategy into action.

Commit that line to memory. Only when the product strategy is complete, is the door unlocked for the team to move into the phase that crafts the future state, the story of the experience. Here we get to the meat of a product vision. The end result is a stand-alone deliverable, capable of demonstrating clear and inspirational future ambitions for a product or service without the need to add additional explanation.

A Four Step Plan

To give you a taste of what’s to come, here is the high-level plan your team will work through. Unlike the strategy phase, this phase is more regimented and will keep to the sequential steps. This not only is the better path to success but is put in place to ease our stakeholders’ peace of mind. Again, not many traditional businesses have faith in product vision work until they see the results and reap the benefits (i.e., think accolades or promotions). Instead of asking for blind faith, you’re asking stakeholders to make an informed decision at every turn. Your plan consists of these four steps:

• Step 1: Kickoff

• Step 2: Storyboards

• Step 3: Concept Ideation and Prototype

• Step 4: Acceptance

Be sure not to cut corners! A thorough completion of each step is paramount to success—the team is building on the output from one step to the next. But before we dive in, you must understand how to harness strategic storytelling. Here’s why: Strategic storytelling is critical to each of the four steps of this phase. Storytelling is the thread that helps teams first make sense of the product vision, and later, it will be a huge part of how you present the product vision to your stakeholders and users. So, the success of a product vision truly depends on the strength of your team’s storytelling abilities.

Empathy

The English word empathy hasn’t been around all that long—it was coined in the early 1900s. The contemporary usage of empathy remains a broad concept, so depending on who you ask, the definition may vary. For our purposes this definition works:

Empathy is the ability—and willingness—to tune into someone else’s vantage point and imagine their experience through their feelings and motivations.

Practicing empathy is best explained by the idiom “Walk a mile in another’s shoes before judging them.” Despite finding a place in the English dictionary only within the last century, empathy is the cornerstone of being human. Practicing empathy is the measurement of emotional intelligence.

Empathy = Storytelling

Empathy isn’t just a handy tool in the storyteller’s toolbox; empathy is storytelling. By harnessing the power of compassionate empathy to tell a compelling story of experience, you grab the attention of your stakeholder audience and transport them to a vivid vision that allows them to live vicariously through the experience of the customer. The more emotionally charged the story, the more those empathetic hug hormones (oxytocin) flood a stakeholder’s brain, deepening the bond and connection the stakeholder forms with the customer. That deep connection will move your stakeholders to take positive action. And you need your stakeholders inspired to sign off on the funding, handle nasty politics, and remove any red tape holding your initiative back from getting into market.

And that emotionally driven momentum won’t stop short. Storytelling is the ultimate communication vehicle that delivers information that will absorb at a much higher retention rate than other mechanisms (think bulleted lists). Those stakeholders won’t forget how they feel any time soon. Imagine, in the not-so-distant future, empathetic stakeholders who are truly tuned in to the needs of the customer and who are compelled to lead with experience rather than leading with features. Amen to that.

Adding Structure

The way to become an exceptional storyteller is to first ground your craft in the elements that structure and shape a story. This step may seem basic, but what’s the definition of a story? Simply put, a story is a series of events, fact or fiction. A plain story is just that: a time line of chronological events. The practice of storytelling seamlessly integrates all the elements to dramatically reveal why things are happening. The mistake of the amateur storyteller is to blindly feel their way through the story and haphazardly address its elements. A professional storyteller hinges their craft on mastering each and every element at their disposal. For our purposes, the fundamental elements suit your needs:

• Characters

• Story arc

• Point of view

• Theme

• Scene

• Setting

Characters. Characters are the roles that take part in the story. The key roles are the main character, the protagonist, and the antagonist. The audience experiences the story through the eyes of the main character. The protagonist is our hero and the agent who moves the plot forward. Often the main character and the protagonist are one and the same—and approaching things this way certainly makes things easier. But the master storyteller has an advanced option at their disposal: separating the main character from the protagonist, thus creating two separate entities. This makes for a more dynamic story and a move we will be optioning for the experience story. The antagonist is the villain and should be a worthy opponent to the protagonist. Lastly, secondary characters support the leading roles and, in our case, will be used sparingly.

Story Arc. The story arc, also known as a narrative arc, is the scaffolding of your plot. Most stories fall into one of a handful of story arc categories. A common story arc begins with an introduction, builds rising action to a conflict, reaches climax, enters a period of falling action, and then finds a resolution. If the protagonist and main character are one and the same, then one thread is pulled through the story arc. But if the storyteller chooses to pull the main character apart from the protagonist, two threads are pulled through the story arc. The first thread focuses on the overarching storyline and viewpoint of the central problem facing the protagonist. The second thread is that of the main characters and follows the first thread closely but tells it from a personal viewpoint.

Point of View. The point of view (POV) refers to who is telling the story and how it is being recounted. The types of POV are first person, second person, and third person. If the POV is first person, the main character is also the narrator.

Theme. The literary theme is the underlying meaning of the story and holds the important job of compelling the plot forward. Examples of common themes are love, justice, revenge, good versus evil, or coming of age.

Scene. A story is made up of scenes. A scene is essentially a mini-story that shows the characters engaging in action or dialogue. A scene should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Setting. The setting is all about context, describing the backdrop in which the events take place. In straightforward terms, the setting is the physical location and time period in which the story takes place.

Now that you have the basics of storytelling under your belt, you are ready to dive into the process of creating the story of the future experience.

Review the Process

Start by reviewing the process with the team. This objective-oriented approach will keep the team prioritized, on task, and driving toward your deliverable. The plan also functions as a statement of work for the nervous stakeholder who needs a little more information before they have unwavering confidence in the effort. The process can be written in an email or a text document.

The Scope and Objectives. Your team will have infinitely better odds of molding a product vision that can go the distance if everyone involved understands what’s expected of them and what the team should be striving to achieve at each step. Create a list of this phase’s four sequential steps. Alongside each step, list a description, action items, and objective. As you learned in Chapter 2, “re-Design School,” the completion of each objective is your rubric for success. The team should pace the work with a sense of urgency; the aim is to complete all the objectives within the allotted time and using the available resources. If the designated time period ends before they have completed the deliverable, the team missed the mark. At the kickoff, examine each of the four steps. It’s helpful to write the plan on a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper in your team room so that it’s always visible. When the team successfully completes an objective, strike it off the list.

Set Expectations. Here is the rule of thumb: Estimating Steps 1 through Step 3 is straightforward. For a well-staffed, experienced core team, dedicate at least three to five business days to each of the first three steps. The exception is Step 4, acceptance. The time and resources required at Step 4 depend on the availability of your executive team (how fast your team can get on their schedule) and the time and resources needed to design a customer study and recruit participants. Be sure to negotiate for this time at the onset of the process. All in all, communicate to stakeholders that the least amount of time an experienced team will need to get through Step 3 is approximately 15 densely packed business days—maybe 10 business days if the team is exceptionally talented and working against a tight deadline. Whatever you do, don’t underestimate the amount of time it will take your team to do the work and don’t skimp on resources.

A good way to condition stakeholders to the depth and time-consuming nature of this work is to use a project management and time-tracking application to scope the effort. For example, create an epic story for each of the four steps, then break down the complexity of each step into achievable stories by sizing every story against the team’s resources. Again, you are talking the language that most software business stakeholders understand.

What Are Experiences?

Most designers know Don Norman as the founding father of contemporary user experience (UX). At Apple, in the 1990s he actually coined the term user experience:

“The user experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.²”

This definition may sound basic, but really, what does it mean? Any experience is someone’s observation of their feelings about an encounter or occurrence. In the context of this work, a company should always be striving for their customers to observe positive feelings after an encounter with their product and service. Whether the feeling of delight comes after a surprisingly quick task within the app or an extremely helpful customer service call, those positive feelings then influence the feelings the customer has toward the brand. This story deliverable expresses this idealized state: presenting a future experience where the user is observing positive feelings about both the product/service and the brand.

Four Pillars Foundational to a Great Experience

After decades of analyzing, designing, delivering, using, and gathering feedback on hundreds of products and services enjoyed by millions of users, we’ve identified that the best ones have something in common—four things, actually. The most effective experiences are built on four universal pillars that constitute the base of how a satisfying and valuable user experience is formed. Each pillar is fairly elementary in terms of its definition, and they can be applied to any product or service in order to improve the overall customer journey (Figure 6.2).

Pillar 1 is Understand Customer Needs. This pillar is the obvious first and most critical step of any quality product or service and a core value of human-centered design. Fortunately, at this point your team has covered this topic extensively in the who portion of your product strategy phase. If you and your stakeholders don’t yet possess a solid understanding of your customer and their needs, it’s time to go back and revisit that product strategy presentation. Again, how your team decides to collect information about your customers is up to you. Perhaps it’s all done through primary research. Maybe you decide to continually gather detailed analytics about how users interact with your product. You potentially have a user base who is willing to consistently share information about their needs with you through surveys and tools that you provide. Any way you slice it, it’s imperative to keep your finger on the pulse of your users and their ever-evolving needs.

Pillar 2 is Set Expectations. You may have noticed that users tend to have increased confidence and better outcomes when expectations are made clear. This is the reason so much effort is made to optimize and enhance user onboarding activities—often when most expectation setting occurs. When users understand the capabilities of a product or service, how to make the best use of it, and what (if anything) is required on their part, it reduces the amount of anxiety they may experience during their interaction. Consider how well you’re setting user expectations with your current product and service offerings. Is there room for improvement? How might you improve on this pillar with your product vision?

Pillar 3 is Provide Value. Now that expectations have been set, it’s time to deliver. That’s where Pillar 3, Provide Value, comes into play. With a deep understanding of your customers’ needs combined with clearly established expectations, you should be ready to meet—or better yet exceed—those expectations by delivering on the value that you established with Pillar 2. Pillar 3 is intentionally open ended because value can mean different things to different customers and businesses. The hard work done during your product strategy phase has prepared you with the knowledge needed to deliver on this pillar. This is the what intended to delight your customers by solving their problems.

Finally, Pillar 4 is Measure Results. We won’t truly know if any of this is working without Pillar 4. Did we truly understand our customers’ needs and meet or exceed their expectations with the offering we delivered? Pillar 4 exists to answer those important questions. Measuring results isn’t only for internal product teams; your users are often interested in the ability to measure progress that they’re making when using your product or service. Consider offerings designed to help track fitness, financial, and other personal or lifestyle goals. Users care about monitoring progress and measuring results, too.

This brings us full circle back to Pillar 1. The action of measuring and analyzing results can often influence your team’s understanding of your customers and can cause a domino effect—coloring how you approach the execution of each pillar moving forward. High-performing agile teams will understand and excel at this kind of iterative process and strive to continue measuring, learning, and improving the value of their offering with each iteration.

Given the universality of the pillars, your team can use them as a framework for crafting the primary scenes in your experience story. How your team defines and activates the specific details of each pillar is up to you and will set your product vision apart from competitive offerings.

The Framework

Thankfully, the backbone of storytelling is rooted in information design, your home turf. The structure of the experience story is a customized framework that maps the essential storytelling elements to your strategy.

Characters. The experience story’s key characters are the main character, the protagonist, and the antagonist (Figure 6.3). As stated earlier, the main character and protagonist are often one and the same. But for our purposes, the main character and protagonist are two separate entities. The main character is the customer (the who building block in our product strategy). The main character should be introduced with just enough background so that the audience can identify with this person. Detailed descriptions should focus on the wants, needs, feelings, and personality traits of the character rather than physical attributes (you should already have this information cataloged as part of an empathy map created during the strategy phase). The protagonist is your company and brand. Your proposed solution (the what from your strategy) isn’t a character per se but is instead a tool that the protagonist will use to help achieve an end goal. Think of the story of King Arthur and Excalibur. King Arthur is the protagonist. He uses his magical sword, Excalibur, as a means to defeat his enemies. In your case, the main character is the customer. The protagonist is your company, the knight in shining armor. The offering, the product or service, is Excalibur. The company may wield Excalibur or give the sword to the customer so that they can wield the power themselves. Lastly, you need an antagonist, your villain. In some experience stories, the antagonist will be an actual person, but in others, the antagonist will be a theoretical problem. For example, in software security, the antagonists are actually people with bad intentions—hackers who are trying to corrupt systems, steal data, or hold it hostage. But in financial services, the antagonist is more of a concept rather than a person. Conceptual examples could include the need for remote team members to collaborate from different locations, a lack of time, a lack of confidence in one’s abilities, or overcoming anxiety (Figure 6.3).

Point of View. The experience story is told through a narrator (third person, omniscient), supplemented with the main character (first person). Third-person omniscient is told using he/she/they and has full access to the thoughts and feelings of the main character. Occasionally, you hear directly from the main character, who tells the audience about their problems, how they feel about their problems, how they discovered the solution, and what it was like when they first experienced the solution. Your audience is able to put themselves in the shoes of the main character, which will build empathy.

Theme. For your purposes, the overarching theme of an experience story (for a product or service) will likely weave together knight in shining armor, perseverance, and triumph. Your customers’ lives are filled with difficult moments or problems, big and small, that must be overcome. Customers are on a quest to triumph over those problems.

Setting. The setting is all about context, describing the backdrop in which the events take place. Here, the setting describes where your customer is encountering the problem and finding the solution. The setting reflects the customers’ everyday lives or an event that prompts the need for an offering. This expresses not only the physical location and time period in which the story takes place, but also the opportunity space, the where of your strategy.

Scenes. The scenes are reflective of the universal experience pillars (Figure 6.2). In our example there are six scenes columns (see Figure 6.4). The four experience pillars are flanked on each side by an on-ramp and a conclusion. The on-ramp is the first column, addressing customer awareness and product onboarding: your customer has a problem to be solved and you make them aware of a new product that could fill that void. The four middle columns each represent an experience pillar, illustrating the customer’s experience with your offering: Pillar 1 is understand your customer’s needs, Pillar 2 is set expectations, Pillar 3 is provide value, and Pillar 4 is measure results. The final scene is the story’s conclusion: now the customer’s needs are met (for now) and life continues. Writing a complementary “How Might We” (HMW) for each scene will help the team create a cohesive story.

For example, these HMWs will work for a number of industry sectors:

• Scene 1, On-Ramp: How might we build awareness and educate potential customers about how your product will deliver value and solve their problem?

• Scene 2, Pillar 1: How might we build a deep understanding, capture, and assess your customers’ needs on an ongoing basis?

• Scene 3, Pillar 2: How might we help customers understand your product/service so that they can get the most out of what it has to offer?

• Scene 4, Pillar 3: How might we use the information that you’ve collected about your customers to meet their needs and provide a superior experience?

• Scene 5, Pillar 4: How might we measure the amount of value that you’ve delivered to your customers?

• Scene 6, Conclusion: How might we see this product growing with the customer and advancing with technology?

Story Arc. The story arc is the scaffolding for your plot (Figure 6.5). For your purposes you will use a traditional story arc. A traditional story arc typically opens by introducing the characters and the setting, and then has a complication or incident. The problem then gets worse (rising action); reaches a turning point (climax) and, hopefully, the problem gets better (falling action); and ultimately, the problem is resolved. Your team will build the story’s content against the flow of the story arc.

At the heart of the structure is the content, the body of the story. Here, in detail, you tell of the customer’s journey, first, before they find the product, and then with the company, via the new product. The problem statement pulled from beginning to end, at the end, the problem is addressed, if not solved.

The body is broken down against the story arc into six scenes. Now, if your protagonist and main character were one and the same, then one storyline thread would be pulled through the story arc. But because the main character was pulled apart from the protagonist, two storyline threads are pulled through the story arc. The overarching big thread focuses on the viewpoint of the central problem facing the protagonist (the problem that the company enlists the product to solve). Perhaps the narrator begins the story by introducing the opportunity that surfaced and the series of steps that led to discovering the customer. The story could then segue to introduce the main character. The main character’s thread follows the big thread but tells it from a personal viewpoint. At the end of the last scene, the problem is solved, and a transformation has taken place.

Keep in mind that you can use your company’s brand values to tailor the tone of the story. For example, an athletic sports apparel company whose core value is fun could incorporate a playful tone.

Timeframe. Last but not least, determine the length of time for an optimal experience. Set the span of time over which the customer’s experience with the product takes place. The span of time may be one day, a week, a month, or a year. For example, an advice offering from a financial services company may track a customer’s journey with the product over a period of a full year or more. The story could then use the four seasons—spring, winter, fall and summer—as a way of conveying the passage of a full year’s time.

Storyboards

As the strategic designer and master storyteller, you may have to teach the dynamics of a well-told story to your team before they dive into writing. Once everyone is familiarized with the experience story structure, flesh out a strong first pass.

Here’s how to get your team set up. Create a story wall in your team room; see Figure 6.6. Find painter’s blue tape and large index cards. With the painter’s tape, make a six-column grid, each column a foot in width. Each column is a scene. Use an index card as a thumbnail (Figure 6.7). The left side of the index card is an illustration, and the right side is a written description. Above each column, write the scene’s respective pillar and HMW question. It can also be helpful to have the story arc and a time line on the wall, a helpful reminder as you work. As you create this draft, identify the thumbnails that should show the user interacting with the actual product. Use star stickers.

Use the revised customer journey to start. Adapt the revised journey to flow with the scenes (pillars) and story arc.

Ideation Exercise

Here’s an ideation exercise to help your core team get the wheels turning. Draw a six-column grid on the whiteboard. At the top of each column, write the scene title and respective HMW question.

With the new experience story top of mind, work to ideate conceptual ideas—features, capabilities, or initiatives—against each scene’s HMW. This is a group effort. Start with the first column, “Enticing value.” This column is the scene that represents the customer’s first time with the product and is an onboarding phase. How might you entice the customer to use this product for the job? Perhaps a chatbot or a proactive text messaging feature reaches out to the customer. List your concept ideas. Go through this same exercise for each column scene (Figure 6.8).

As the team offers ideas, be on guard to call out and challenge legacy thinking—you don’t want any stale ideas shaping your product vision. But always do this respectfully.

Sketching Exercise

This sketching exercise asks each team member to pick one or two ideas from the previous ideation list and flesh out those ideas in a storyboard fashion. The instructions are the same from the workshop: on a single page of paper, fold the paper in thirds. The first third is the storyboard’s beginning, the second third is the middle, and the final third is the end. The complete storyboard illustrates how the proposed concept is solving the customer’s problem.

Remix Exercise

It’s always time for a remix! Who doesn’t love remixing? If you need a thorough refresher, revisit this segment from the strategy workshop from Chapter 5. In short, each team member tapes their sketching exercise to the wall, gallery style, and stands in front of the team as they talk through their idea—with the group’s full attention. The group takes notes of remixing ideas. Remember, a remix is defined as a new concept that is created by modifying someone else’s idea or melding multiple concepts from various presenters. One concept can build on and/or augment another concept for the better. After each sketch is presented, the group works together again. The team is now charged with fleshing out a handful of detailed concepts, working from all the sketches and remixing notes.

Coming out of the working sessions, the team should have a clear idea of how to assemble the conceptual solution—and have ample storyline ideas. Now you’re prepared to both finalize the experience story and define the conceptual solution, and from it, craft a basic prototype. The team can divide these responsibilities to work simultaneously and in sync.

Finalize the Storyboards

If several variations to the main storyline came out of the working sessions, the team should identify the variation to move forward with. Then, polish each scene into sketched thumbnails—quickly done, small drawings that help your ideas take shape. Remember that each scene is a mini-story. By using the index cards and story wall, you can easily move the thumbnails around.

Once your team has decided on the story flow, storyline, and scene breakdown, the content strategist will smooth out the work. The team’s content strategist, or the team member with strongest writing chops, should be partnering with the designer—the designer sketches, the content strategist writes. Remind the writer that they aren’t crafting a scripted dialogue here. If dialogue is required in the next phase, that’s where that task is executed.

As you work through the storyboards, highlight one or two thumbnails in each scene where it would be helpful to show a prototype screen.

Craft a Basic Prototype

Now is the time to shape the conceptual solution into a simple prototype form. But before your technologists and developers get too excited, remind them what a prototype is. A prototype is a testable, early-stage release of a product, service, or process that you want to build. For this purpose, your prototype will take its most basic form: screens that correlate to the experience pillars and demonstrate, at a high level, how the user will interact with the product. We’re not talking about a fully functioning, high-fidelity software build. Overengineering a prototype by adding too much unnecessary detail is often the biggest mistake a team can make. The longer a team spends refining and perfecting a prototype, the more attached to it they’ll become. This makes people less inclined to make adjustments based on feedback. The team should be able to pivot against the prototype work with only a few days of tactical work lost. A team who is investing weeks or months nurturing a prototype build has taken the work way too far—this type of build is often called a “prototype baby”—and will pay for it sooner rather than later. For the product vision, craft the prototype by identifying only the most critical screens and interactions that help you tell the experience story.

Quick note: When a vision is set to the near or mid-term, you will notice that creating the simple prototype is more straightforward because you have a better understanding of the technological capabilities. But if the vision is intended for a more distant future, the prototype can be a mind-bending challenge simply because you have very little frame of reference. But who doesn’t love a challenge?

Determine Level of Effort

At this point, the team has everything they need for production. Now you ask your stakeholders which deliverable effort level they want to move forward with. Producing the final stand-alone deliverable will require one of three levels of effort depending on your available time, resources, and the level of impact you’d like the vision to deliver: a lighter lift, medium lift, or heavy lift.

Decide On Effort Level with Stakeholders

How to advise stakeholders which type of deliverable to choose over another? First, consider the time period this vision takes place. Does the vision take place in the relatively near term or far off in the future? A product vision that is near-term will have a goal of achieving the vision within six months to a few years. Near-term visions are well suited for the light to medium effort. If the vision is set further in the future, then your deliverable is usually best produced as a video. Remember Apple’s futuristic tablet experience video? That vision was created in the 1980s and stood the test of time before the Apple iPad and FaceTime became reality in 2011. The video format is able to display and communicate aspects that may be more nuanced and difficult to express with storyboards alone. Of course, a video will require extra resources, time, and budget, but well-produced videos are more likely to create an emotional connection with the audience.

Discuss the pros and cons of various deliverable options with stakeholders, negotiate the amount of time needed, and if required, include additional resources. For example, a lighter deliverable effort, such as a marketing landing page, would typically take an experienced team with all of the background information and supporting content at their disposal less than a week to complete. But a heavier effort, like a professionally produced video, will take longer to deliver. The postproduction work alone could easily devour two to four weeks.

Post to an Internal Audience

The final action is to post the entire effort—the stand-alone deliverable and strategy—to your company’s most widely used collaboration tool. Doing so ensures that your story is being countlessly retold with the same integrity as if the team were there to give it a voice.

Perhaps this means asking the developers to create an internal-facing (secure) URL like productvision.company.com. The page layout is made of roughly seven stacked sections. The topmost slim section of the page gives the reader a bit of context about the project and the team. Immediately following should be five sections, each dedicated to a building block: the who, where, what, when, and why. The final section is the embedded stand-alone deliverable: the video, an animation short, or a marketing slideshow. The footer provides links to email the team’s primary contacts and to download the full strategy, and even directs to the small mountain of supporting documentation. You’re giving the audience the opportunity to dive in as deep as they want to. This section also helps facilitate intelligent, informed conversations.