 Hello, everyone, and welcome to my talk about storytelling for product managers. My name is Florian. I'm the head of product for the right experience at Tier Mobility. And I would like to share a very simple technique today with you on how to create this one or two sentence elevator pitch for the product or feature that you're working on. Because let's be real, the question of what you're working on these days is looming around and can be asked by anyone, friends, family, and it's always nice to have a good and precise answer to that. It might also be your boss on the literal elevator asking this, wanting to know what you're up to. And of course, being the very informed and in-depth product manager that you are, of course, you have to answer to it, right? So, well, you're working on a neat feature that will increase month three retention by 5.7 percent for a customer segment of occasional users with an estimated return of investment of 350K in customer lifetime value. Amazing. Or is it a problem with this while being an accurate answer in a couple of circumstances? It's not kind of the case for every situation that you might be in. And this is where storytelling comes in. In a nutshell, the idea of storytelling is to simplify information and convey it in a way that is more memorable because people can relate to it personally. The way it works is like if you hear a story, your brain creates pictures out of that. And these triggers emotion and are usually to recall. And that's at the core of it. If I would ask you now like what the uplift is that I mentioned on the slide before, it might be very hard to remember what that person's answer was. So, here storytelling can really help. I can kick that off with a question where your customer Frodo Baggins from the Lord of the Rings have in common just to get into a couple of techniques from the storytelling area. And the answer to that question is they are both on the hero's journey. So, the hero's journey is a tool or a technique from storytelling. It dates back to Ancient Greece. It's a framework for telling a compelling story. And you can use it to talk about your product or feature. And it will help you because it uses similar patterns that everyone faces in their daily lives. So, this makes it really, really relatable. And you can of course use it to inform your customers or potential customers about why they should adopt your product or basically also use it internally or for everyone is asking what you're working on to get like a very precise and relatable answer. So, some of the biggest Hollywood productions use the hero's journey to tell their story. And if you would go and revisit them or review them, I'm pretty sure that you will definitely be able to identify all these elements after this talk. So, why shouldn't you use the hero's journey? There's absolutely no reason, the answer is you should. So, what is the hero's journey? It all starts with a character, obviously, that lives in a known world. There's also the unknown, we'll get to that. But in this known world, there's business as usual, but there's occasions where something new happens. A call to adventure, usually in stories, it's some sort of crazy event that's happening. But in terms of our product world, it might be you introduce a new product or a feature that you would like people to adopt. They might be a bit hesitant, so there's a refusal of the call at first until the moment where they actually meet a guide. And this is where a transformation begins because in order to, there might be something that people want to achieve in their known world, even though they do business as usual, new problems might arise or something like this. But they need to transform in order to kind of overcome any problems that they might have, right? This is kind of venturing into the unknown world. And here the guide helps, crossing the threshold and then there's a lot of kind of tests or things to be learned, things that our character needs to overcome to ultimately face the supreme ordeal and kind of overcome all the hurdles and all the problems that they might be facing, all the challenges. So this is where the guide helps and of course there is a reward for that that is happening afterwards. And then you can see like going back to the known world, but having like all these new tools and new knowledge that was kind of acquired in the unknown world might ultimately help you in the known world as well. So basically, yes, you return with the Alex here and leaving the character or your potential user as a new and approved version of themselves. This is kind of happening in all these big Hollywood stories and it can also be a driver for telling the story about your product or feature. What I mean by that is if you introduce a new product to the known world of a person, ideally it results in an opportunity to become a better version of oneself or themselves. So no one would use your product just because it's there, right? They want to get something out of it. There's something new or there's a problem that they intend to basically resolve with that. And then you have like a new and approved me. There can be like a million different drivers, could be social ones, could be like very practical ones, but there's always this kind of thing that you need to balance out. And it's very, very likely that if you introduce something that in many cases you will be replacing an existing solution. So in order to make it compelling for the users or for your potential users, well them and also the audience that you're telling the story about your product need to understand like why they should bother dealing with you at all or with your product that you're offering them how it ultimately can help them getting the job done, whatever they need to get done and what the product actually is and why it might be worth the trouble of firing another product for it. So a couple of questions we need to answer and to get that done in a very, very brief and precise way we can use the hero's journey. So there's a couple of elements and I didn't come up with that but it's actually developed by Donald Miller. He used this for branding. It's an amazing book called Building a Story Brand to tell your story but you can also use it not just for marketing purposes obviously but to every hero's journey there's a couple of elements that you should be addressing in your pitch and this is, it starts with a character obviously this would be your user or your potential user. They start out with a problem. Obviously there needs to be some sort of friction or maybe an opportunity. That meets a guide who gives them a plan, very important. We need to highlight what we can basically offer and calls them to action because everyone ultimately needs a little nudge to try things out before we reach a certain level of stickiness. That helps them to avoid failure and ends in success and yes also failure can be like a very very strong driver for people adopting products or features and ultimately you want success. So if you try to kind of create this one or two sentence pitch from what you're working on or what the product or feature is using these steps and finding answers to them can give you the outline for this sentence. So to give you an example maybe first it's very important that you are the guide very easy to overlook. This is not you. It's very easy to put yourself or your product in the shoes of the hero but it's not. The hero is the potential customer or the person you want to transform into the hero. So you are the guide. Your product is the guide. Your product will help ultimately. To give you an example always focus on helping the hero. In a previous job I did we have been building up a cooking platform called Mi Clasa and basically providing video life courses for cooking and it was very easy for us to say hey you know what we're doing Mi Clasa is the best cooking platform in the world. While it might be true it's also very likely that there's also a million other cooking platforms in the world so it's not a very compelling thing to say. It's starting with us and saying yes we are basically the hero we are the best but running this through the hero's journey framework we came up with something better because of course we had a character or a certain user segment in mind and we knew what we were offering and we knew why we were offering it. So ultimately we scratched all that and transformed it in something more compelling. We helped single parents putting a fresh meal in front of their kids every day by providing simple recipes and easy to follow live video classes. So that addresses like whom is this for? It's for single parents, yeah. They have a problem because obviously the kids they care very much about and they want the best for them so including of course giving them all the the dietary needs or kind of the best nutrition they can get with a fresh meal maybe home cooked you know but of course they are very busy so it's not very easy to deliver that so there's also a certain fear in there right something that where they might face failure by getting another ready-made meal or something like this and the way we're doing this is by providing simple recipes that everyone can do and easy to follow live video classes so we completely transformed this kind of inner perspective or perspective on our product and how great it is to make it more compelling for an easy to identifiable for a certain customer group. Can give you another example from my current work at Tier we're offering scooter rides and we have a feature that allows you to reserve a scooter so we have been building this but not just because we can but because it does something right and we could easily answer like hey what are we doing hey we have a reservation feature and allows you to reserve a scooter for 10 minutes and it's true right however we also have been doing this for a certain customer segment and they can get something out of it so again by running it through the framework of the hero's journey we arrived at something better our reservation feature ensures right over the commitment so people that need to be somewhere at a certain time that a distance scooter will still be available when they get there so there's a fear that they might have that they might not be on time that we address here it will still be available when they get there we ensure that by this feature reservation lasts for 10 minutes and it's free right like very very relatable so this can help you really to kind of get the essence of what you're building and what you're doing and put it into let's say a short story so next time when someone asks this what are you working on these days you might have like a better answer to it our reservation feature ensuring riders commitment distance scooter and also the reply might be a very different one because immediately the audience whoever you're telling this kind of tries to relate that to themselves and you might get a different answer but it can tell you how often I run into the exact same problem so I'll check it out for sure and then you have like a very very different connection which is kind of more relatable just by running it through this framework and just to reiterate and then we're also at the end already is always ask yourself or run what you're doing and you probably already have answered the questions before and like through the elements of the hero's journey whom is it for what's the problem you're trying to address how can you basically help what kind of plan can you give this character and to basically avoid failure and help them to be successful in whatever they want to achieve and by doing so you can get to like a very condensed and precise description of what you're working on so with that I already close this talk thanks for listening if you would like to know more or just get in touch you can find me easily on LinkedIn hope this helped hope you have in the future a very good answer to the question what you're working on which also includes the question of why you're working on this and see you soon have a nice day