Lean storytelling: pitch and share your business or product in one minute
What Lean Storytelling is:
- Technique to tell stories easily, using best practices, in order to be understood by your audience
More:
- It is a basic set of recipes to help shape a story
- It is quite easy to read and understand, but difficult to master: practice a lot
- Fit for a businesses, products and features development (NOT to be a succesful Hollywood screenwriter or awarded novelist)
- Usable from early stage to delivery phases: empathy, problem discovery, ideation, specs, development, test, deployment, communication, sales, advertising, explainer videos, documentation
- Keep everyone in sync and aligned across different teams, remove some of the natural friction and misunderstading
- People will understand the "why", the goal, the guiding light, the north star of you story
- Inspired by Lean Canvas, Monomyth, and The Golden Circle
- Roots in Agile, Lean Startup, Design Thinking, UX research, entrepreneurship
- Very simple and humble, voluntarily minimalistic by design, using the systemic approach
- Tell a story, using the base ingredients
- If you want/need to detail, use the options
- Try, learn, get feedback, remix, change, and adapt to your audience, always & continuously
- If you reduce your story to the bare minimum, just a few words, you might land on your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
- If you want to seriously learn strong story telling techniques, read the right litterature
- This story telling technique differentiates: it is lean and agile, not generic, more dedicated to businesses
These are the three building blocks, the foundations of a good story:
- Target: the user or the buyer, the hero of the journey/adventure, the one who will unergo the biggest changes
- Problem: the target's problem or antagonism
- Solution: your solution, but don't say too much about it
Add the necessary details, to re-inforce the story:
- Target
- Empathy: what the target sees, feels, hears, says
- Problem
- Consequences: the impact of the problem on the target's daily life
- Solution
- Benefits: the benefits that your solution offers
Add a contextual start, and an inspirationnal end:
- Context: in what landscape the target evolves
- Target
- Empathy
- Problem
- Consequences
- Solution
- Benefits
- Why: the main motivator behind the story
Add any item, wherever you feel:
- Challenge of the audience, a open question
- Quote, in order to validate the pain point or the benefits
- Alternatives, unsatisfying solutions to the hero's problem
- Competition to the solution, but yours is better
- Unfair advantage of your solution
- Warnings
- Self-benefits on your business/product
- Stages in AARRR
- Call To Action
- A failure, a failed attempt before the solution is found
In a simple tables, this gives:
| Core items | Detail items | Complete story |
|---|---|---|
| Context: where and when, the surroundings of the hero | ||
| Target, the hero, who it is about | ||
| Empathy, what the hero sees and feels | ||
| Problem the hero faces, that slows down (NOT the absence of YOUR solution) | ||
| Consequences of the problem | ||
| Solution, what you offer, and how | ||
| Benefits, the advantages your solution delivers | ||
| Why, he guiding light, your internal compass |
Lean Storytelling ("TopSol Playbook") is a set of recipes, templates and good practices, to help you shape your story telling for businesses and products. It is a guidance
It is aimed at business-oriented people, like product owners/managers, scrum masters, agile coaches, designers, engineers, marketing people, sales people, founders and C-levels CxO.
Lean Storytelling ("TopSol Playbook") may help you tell stories, but also may help you shape your {unique|key} value proposition.
It can be used to:
- describe a User Story or Epic, within an Agile team, using Scrum or Kanban, allows to project and better picture the expected outcome
- in a customer interview, test a solution, or a {unique|key} value proposition, validate or invalidate, persist or pivot, useful for Lean Startup and Design Thinking approaches
- sell a solution, product, or feature
Lean Storytelling helps you synchronise and align all the people involed in the User Story factory/pipeline.
A well-shaped story can be delivered in many ways:
- spoken, with or without body language, like a podcast, ad, videoconference, vidéo, meetup, speech, public speaking
- written, in a blog post, slide deck, ticket, social media
- Playbook, because I didn't want another "framework" ;-) and to underline it is not an advanced story telling technique
- TopSol, because To-P-Sol:
- To: Target, the people and personas you are targetting with your product or service
- P: Problem, the problem they face and suffer from, that is worth fixing
- Sol: Solution, the solution that you bring to your targets
Standing on shoulders of giants who stand on shoulders of giants, Lean Storytelling has its roots in:
- the Lean Canvas approach by Ash Maurya, I highly recommend this free online course: https://www.udemy.com/lean-canvas-course/ by Ash Maurya.
- Monomyth or "Hero's journey": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey
- The Golden Circle ("Why How What") by Simon Sinek: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action
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- Suggest modifications
- Submit a patch or a merge request
- Share your knowledge and experience
Lean Storytelling is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
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