 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining the webinar today. I'll be your speaker and we'll talk about an intro to writing narratives for product managers. Let me quickly introduce myself. I'm a senior product manager at Zalando. And my whole product career I've been working in two side of the marketplaces. A few years working on the discovery side of the marketplaces where recommendations, personalizations, matching score happens. And now working at Zalando in the conversion side with the conversion funnel of marketplaces. And I lead the checkout experience. As you can see here, a couple of pictures about me. So I love traveling. And sometimes I do cool slash stupid stuff here in the skydiving. And recently I've been obsessed with cooking and I'm being into cooking so much. And here in this picture is one of my latest personal achievement of making a really, really good homemade buns. And as you can see here, recently we got a new friend who loves to set in a very weird places. And we call her Asoli, which is an Arabic word translated to white beans. Let me start off the presentation with a quick disclaimer. While I'm coming here to talk about writing narratives and so on. But it's important to mention that I consider myself a student in the writing narratives school. I have never been a good writer before. And because it was not part of my product culture in my whole product group for joining Zalando. I've been working in small startups where we are very focused on shipping things, not writing things down for Al-Himd. And then I got introduced to this concept while I joined Zalando two and a half years ago. And I got fascinated. It is really interesting and important kind of concept, especially in company sizes like Zalando and Amazon and Google and so on so forth. So please consider this as my personal attempt to share my own learning and experience. I'm still learning every day with every new paper I write to every new different audience that I present to. Also, this could be also considered as a collection of things that worked with me and tips that worked with other colleagues inside Zalando. So let's jump in. We have very limited time, so consider this as a brief intro to the why, what and how of writing narratives. Let's start with the why. Why companies in the size of Zalando, Amazon and several more touched presentations and PowerPoints in meetings and collaboration, and especially specifically also taking decisions. Why they started working with writing documents or writing narratives rather than presentations and PowerPoint. That's an important concept and it's not an easy change. Why that happened? Let's see. First, writing narratives forces deep thinking. When you write a documentation, it forces you to organize your thoughts. It helps you to avoid misinterpretation. Ajay's base is one set PowerPoint style presentation somehow gives permission to gloss over ideas. It flatten out any sense of relative importance and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas. This is what we call a narrative that you start with something and end with something and the whole journey from the start to end gives this kind of interconnectedness and relative importance to each other. Second, writing is an glamorous path to clarity. It puts emphasis on substance over style. It's not flashy. It's not inherently attracted by design. It doesn't have animations or so many pictures or colors. It needs and it requires depth to be valuable. Writing bridges meaningful dialogue where we focus on factual narrative, data points, deep dive details. It is by design brings different perspectives from different people in the same document. It provides an invitation to the stakeholders to share their thoughts, their opinion on what is shared in the document rather than one side monologue in the presentations. And also it allows people to take their time to digest a complex topic. You take your time to understand it. You take your time to express your thoughts, your disagreement, concerns. And also in what we have right now in remote or hybrid based working models, writing documents are quite essential to facilitate that. And this was one of my favorites. In a document, introverts equal extroverts. For example, this presentation is quite consuming to me. I'm an introvert. And the quality and outcome of the presentation rely heavily on my energy of having this mass communication with so many people. In a document makes my life easier and produce much better quality independent on my energy and performance during the delivery of presentation. Finally, in the why, a document will outlive you. Remember that while you're writing any document. Written documents last. They outlive their author and the moment and time they were created. And by the time every new details or information or iterations were put into the document, they become self explanatory. They don't need their presenter anymore to present them. So we briefly talked about why companies like Zalando and Amazon and many more that presentations and focus more on writing narratives while taking decisions. Let's quickly dive into an example of a writing narrative and a writing narrative artifact. It's important to remind yourself. It's a mindset. It's a mindset and a process. It's a way of thinking. And one of these mindsets called working backwards. And the intent of working backwards process is to work backwards from the customer pain points or business opportunity. Rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to build customers into it. And we as product managers are quite good at this. So it's important to immerse yourself in a process and adopt a process that helps you and facilitates and sometimes force you to start at the end with the problem, not with the solution. One of the main artifacts of writing narratives called PRFQ, it's short to press release and frequently asked questions. It's a six page document that consists of two parts press release and frequently asked questions. The press release is kind of the an elevator pitch of what you envision the product experience would look like for your customers and how their life would look like because of your product and how their pain points would be resolved through your product. And you consider it as a leap into the future, a time machine that you can communicate to your stakeholders, something that doesn't exist at the moment and excite them about the future. And the FAQs are actually the main course of the document where you put all the heavy lifting of questions related to execution and business related to the problem customer solutions. This is a template and a sample of a template of how the press release would look like. It's quite standard, but again make your own depends on the problem or the scope. It starts with heading, then subheading, and then quite a summary, and then you associate a customer, a customer code. At the end, you talk more about the solution. Let's start with the heading. The heading is a one liner where you communicate the value proposition. What is the one value that you would like your customer or your audience to get out of the room with? This should catch the attention of your customers. And then this is your subheading follows where you describe more the target audience and the segment that you are targeting and how they look like and how their experience would look like right now. And then you dive deeper into summary where you talk more about your new product or your new features and the benefits that are provided to your customer through your product. Then it's a time to help your stakeholders empathize with your customer by quoting one of your customers a couple more about their pain points. Also, I would suggest here that you associate real customer quotes, whether from quotes or feedback that you see in your feedback channels or kind of things that you heard in your customer interviews directly. Your job here to try to visualize the pain and the urgency of the pain to your stakeholders. Finally, it is the time to talk about the solution and how the customer experience would look like of the new product. So that was the press release. After the press release, all your energy would be put into the frequently asked questions. And it is segmented into two parts, external FAQs and internal FAQs. So you get my moment. External FAQs and internal FAQs. And external FAQs are basically directed to your customers, to your consumers. Expect or think about it like you actually release the product today and you're trying to build a self service help center to your customers. What kind of questions that we have in their mind and you would like to answer for them? For example, what is new in the product and why would they care about this? Why it's important to them? How they would use it? How would they find it? What's needed for them to use it? Do they need a certain subscription for a plan? How much does it cost? And so on and so forth. Try to anticipate what questions your customer would have to understand your product properly. And then you kick off your internal FAQs, which is directed for your colleagues, your stakeholders, your management. You talk here about the depth and details of the problem itself and the business opportunity. There are several questions that are generic but important that you could follow. For example, you can start with what is the customer segment and describe them thoroughly, what is their size, what their job to be done. And also, what is their problem? And here try to make the problem very vivid and meaningful. What is the problem size as well? And I would suggest here you use all the data points, all the important data points and relevant data points. You have whether qualitative or quantitative to portray the picture for your stakeholders. Your job here is to make the problem worth solving and the problem is urgent to be solved. And talk more about the size and how urgent it is to be solved. Then you could talk about the business or the commercial impact expected from this problem. The question would have here in your leadership head, why should I invest in this? Consider resourcing your project or the time that your team will put into the project is kind of investment. So ask yourself why people, why my leadership, why my team should invest in this project. So it depends on what you're going to say about the problem and the urgency of the problem and the size of the problem and also of the commercial impact or expected commercial impact out of this. Then you talk about the proposed solution, how the experience would look like. And here it's not expected to have a high fidelity solution or prototype. What's important here is try to portray a picture of how the experience would look like and how it's different from what we have today. And what kind of capabilities that we need to build this kind of solution. It might be also useful that you mention how the competition address this problem and how the experience would look like. Finally, don't end this document without talking about how you're going to measure your success and how the success would look like. What kind of KPIs you're going to use, whether input or out or God will keep you. Finally, you could also go an extra mile and mention what kind of trade offs or risks that you expect from this solution or from this direction that you're going to propose and how we can mitigate that. And remind yourself, the main value of such document or artifact like PRFQ is to facilitate answering the question, is this problem worth solving now? And now is also on a keyword. It might be worth solving but is it worth solving now? And also, is this the right solution? If it's a solution document, is this the right scope? Is this an average narrative? So we talked quickly on why companies like Zalando and Amazon switched from presentations to writing narratives and we talked quickly about one of the artifacts of this writing narratives, what's called PRFQ. Now I will try to share several tips that personally worked with me or I heard from other colleagues inside Zalando. First thing first, write for yourself. That's one of the main important tips that I would like you to remember from this whole presentation. The first person needs the writing of this paper is you. You need clarity, you need to let your thoughts out in a paper and judge them objectively and think out loud. Are there any gaps? Are there any areas that need more depth or understanding? And read them out loud and see if they make any sense to a third person view. It's important to do that. Second, start somewhere. It's a hard skill. Believe me, it's naturally hard to getting things right as writing narratives at the beginning. So be kind to yourself, especially for non-native speakers. It might take you quite some time. Everyone starts at the same place of not knowing how to do it. Then the learning process starts with iterations and practice. Don't start any paper without setting a clear goal to the paper. Ask yourself why I'm writing this paper. Is it to report something, to inform something, to convince stakeholders to invest in solving certain problems or enabling certain solutions or to inspire them with a new vision? Also, make sure that after you finish the paper, evaluate the paper. Did you reach the goal that you set for yourself or not based on what you set in the beginning? Then, picture a single person that you are writing to. This person is not in your team. This person doesn't have your background. This person doesn't know or doesn't have the knowledge you have about the topic. And at the end of reading this paper, this person needs to understand what's going on and why we should solve this and why we should care about this topic. You need to describe this person in your head very clearly. What they know and what they don't know. What they need to know and what they don't need to know. That will help you to tune your tone and choose what kind of information that you need to put in the paper and what not. Remind yourself at the end that if the problem is small and the solution is small, there is no need to have written nurse. Go directly and go ahead directly and build it. So that was setting up your mind before starting the document. Now you're starting the document. You actually start in the document itself. Don't start with a planned page. Start with a structure or a sample of document in your head. Throw random ideas in your personal notes and keep iterating and adding these random ideas or thoughts in your personal note or in the structure of the document. Your goal here is to have some sort of an outline first. The outline is half of the job already. Once you know the parts and the flow of your narrative, your job will become easier and you focus your time and energy to fill in this information over time. Be concise, please. Be concise. More is not always better. Use only enough content to move your story forward and present your case clearly. And before adding any piece of information, ask yourself, is this information essential to clarify my message or is it just interesting? And in the editing part, remove anything that sounds just interesting, not essential. Being concise is important, but being clear is much more important. If conciseness wouldn't make your message clear enough, please prioritize clarity over conciseness. Don't make something that is unclear more concise. Make it clear first. Yeah, that's important. Also, I've heard, I've learned the hard way. Don't work on it alone. Don't work on a paper alone. It's not a one-person job. It needs to get different perspectives before exposing for alignment and take it as an opportunity for collaboration and working with other team members. It gets better when you work with other members or other people on the same document. Consider information hierarchically, and here I would like to talk very quickly on one of the principles called the pyramid technique. It has three principles. Lead with assertion. The assertion is the answer or the recommendation or the takeaway. Lead with that first. Then give main supporting arguments to this assertion. Then support these arguments with data, whether data is qualitative or quantitative. Think of the reader as somebody who reads from the top to the bottom and might stop at any point. Every additional sentence needs to add to the next most important information. And here is the beauty of this approach that you lead with the most important part of your story and reinforce it only with necessarily messaging. It cuts out all the fluff and focuses your audience on making a decision. Use generative AI, but never start with them. It's the time that we have a lot of generative AI tools around us, whether Grammarly or Word or ShadGBT. They are incredibly important and useful in writing, especially if English is not your native language, but never start with them. They are just a statistical model. You need to remember that. They don't know your audience. They don't know your goal. They don't know your tone. You don't know that. So start with it. Then you can refine the paper and the writing using tools to make them better. That's one of the tips that I've also learned from my manager that grip papers are written and rewritten again. Remind yourself with that also to be kind and be patient. The magic is in the editing and iteration after you share the first draft. It's not in the first draft. The first draft probably would not be good at all. After you finish the first draft, stop, breathe and sleep on it. Ideas, thoughts and improvements come over time. They will come while you're showering, while you're walking, while you're doing sports. That's science. The goal is to have a short version of your paper as quick as possible to get feedback on. Observe great writing and copy great writing. It's like a recipe that you need to follow as is in the start and then you get better at it. There is a Japanese concept called Shuhari. It's first you mimic, then you do with improvement and finally you do it your own. You have your own style. You have your own way of writing. And this is how I started to learn and improve my writing. I started to copy my manager and a couple of friends, a couple of colleagues writing. And I started to attend other sessions internally where a paper is being discussed. And I started to observe how they approach the problem and what is their writing style. And then I learned more and more and have my own style over time of how I should approach writing specific paper. Now you're done with your writing, writing the paper. It's time for review with your leadership or your management or your stakeholders. Please have allies before the session. Don't put yourself in a position that everyone in the review reads your paper for the first time. Engage with your main stakeholders before the session. Seek their guidance, take their feedback and have allies. You have done a great job and put a lot of efforts in your paper. But expect that you will get feedback, you will get concerns, you will get pushback. Be open for that feedback. And whenever you got asked questions, don't be defensive and don't answer questions. Think about the particular reviewer question. Why they ask this question? What they have in mind? What they are worried about? And take that gracefully and also make sure that you understand the question and repeat your understanding. It's important to remind yourself. Writing narratives and PRFQ and all of these artifacts are just tools. The goal is to create a customer value. Finally, you have done all of this good job. But again, the answer could be no. No could also be a good answer. Why? Because it is early in the process. You didn't invest much with your team time and efforts. You reach a conclusion of alignment that this is not something that we would like to do at the moment, or this is not the right solution, or this is not the right scope, or this doesn't align with our business direction. And even the consensus is no. It's important to focus on what you learned through this experience. You probably grew your personal network. You got new insights into the strategy of business. And definitely I bet you improved your narrative skills through this. Yeah, I'm done with the presentation. And I hope I had a lot of fun and pleasure doing so. So I hope it was fun to you as well and valuable and useful. You will find, please, if you have any questions, play them in the comments and I'll get back to you. And if you have any questions, I placed also my LinkedIn profile in the presentation. So yeah, see you and good luck and have a good day.