3.2. Why Storytelling

“Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems. A good product story has three elements:

» It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides.

» It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.

» It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.

Your product’s story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It’s the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you’ve created.

And the story doesn’t just exist to sell your product. It’s there to help you define it, understand it, and understand your customers. It’s what you say to investors to convince them to give you money, and to new employees to convince them to join your team, and to partners to convince them to work with you, and to the press to convince them to care. And then, eventually, it’s what you tell customers to convince them to want what you’re selling.

And it all starts with “why.”

Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it?

5.4. A Method to the Marketing

“1. Marketing cannot just be figured out at the very end. When building a product, product management and the marketing team should be working together from the very beginning. As you build, you should continue to use marketing to evolve the story and ensure they have a voice in what the product becomes.

1. Use marketing to prototype your product narrative. The creative team can help you make the product narrative tangible. This should happen in parallel with product development—one should feed the other.

1. The product is the brand. The actual experience a customer has with your product will do far more to cement your brand in their heads than any advertising you can show them. Marketing is part of every customer touchpoint whether you realize it or not.

1. Nothing exists in a vacuum. You can’t just make an ad and think you’re done. The ad leads to a website that sends you to a store where you purchase a box that contains a guide that helps you with installation, after which you’re greeted by a welcome email. The entire experience has to be designed together, with different touchpoints explaining different parts of your messaging to create a consistent, cohesive experience.

1. The best marketing is just telling the truth. The ultimate job of marketing is to find the very best way to tell the true story of your product.

We all ultimately want to find the strategy that is best for our business. Rather than asking individuals to find that answer for themselves and then fight it out, this approach enables the team to uncover the strongest option together. A standard process is characterized by arguments about what is true. By turning instead to exploring what would have to be true, teams go from battling one another to working together to explore ideas. Rather than attempting to bury real disagreements, this approach surfaces differences and resolves them, resulting in more-robust strategies and stronger commitment to them.

Donald used the mind-set of curiosity to reframe his complaint, “Why the hell am I doing this?,” into a new question, “What is so interesting around there that it keeps all these people coming back to this company day after day?” He followed that question into lots of Life Design Interviews with his colleagues, looking for the ones who were really enjoying themselves and had figured out just what the hell they were doing there. When he combined his insights from those stories with the results from his Good Time Journal, the pattern was clear. The way to get re-energized was to refocus on the people. He discovered that he wasn’t in the wrong place, he was just in the wrong state of mind. He’d gotten so preoccupied with the what and the how of business success and family responsibilities that he’d completely forgotten the why and the who. He reinvented himself without having to change anything about his situation. Reframing his work from “getting the job done” to “creating a dynamic culture where my employees love their work” was transformative.