Happily Ever After - The Reason We Tell Stories

Emilie Lindström at UXDX Community: Berlin. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZggicq7-Q

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why we remember stories

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in. My name is Emilie and I work at Outfittery as a product manager here in Berlin. I will talk to you about a topic that is very warm to my heart, and that I think is one of the most powerful tools that we have as product managers, or as people potentially. I want to talk about storytelling and the reason why we tell stories, and also the things that we tend to forget.

[00:00:24] To get in the mood of this, I would like you all to take a moment and think about a story that you were told as a kid. Maybe it was during your bedtime when someone read it to you, maybe it was a movie that really got stuck in your head, or something about turtles or something about brave princesses, something. Just take a minute and think about it, and what's the first thing that comes to your mind.

[00:01:02] Maybe you would be able to retell that story pretty well. Maybe not from the once upon a time until the happily ever after, but parts in between you would be able to tell about. You would be able to tell me a little bit about the hero and maybe some of the challenges, or some of the other people or characters that are in the story. There's definitely a lot there that you would be able to tell just from reminiscing a little bit.

[00:01:26] And why is that? Well, we remember these stories because they make sense, because we have the full picture. We get drawn into these stories by heroes that are exciting, and we want to know what's happening, and then in the end we know they have a lot of people who are happy to tell them. Everything makes sense. Everything that unraveled to us in the story makes sense. I'm not saying that giant beanstalks climbing into the heavens and killing giants are sensible things, but they do make sense as a story. This is the reason why stories work and why we do tend to tell them a lot: because we understand them. We get the whole point. We get why a story is being told.

We have always told stories

[00:02:14] We've told stories forever. We've told stories since the early cave paintings that are like 30,000 years old, where we had little buffaloes being chased by tiny humans with spears. We were told how to hunt and what to hunt already back then. And then we were told endless stories about the Greek mythology, and the mysticism in the world was being explained by these stories. And then coming to things like the stories about trolls and scary lake monsters. All of these stories were told to keep us away from dangerous things, so that we didn't wander off into forests by ourselves.

[00:03:00] And there were generational stories passing through, where they were sitting around the campfire talking about what to harvest, how to harvest, and so on. I don't know that much about harvesting because nobody told me this, but there's a lot of stuff that was being told in stories. And then came the printing press, where we could get these stories to last forever. With this we were also expanding the knowledge to certain things that happen today. We had the newspapers telling us current stories, making us aware and engaged in what's going on around the world. And we have the whole world of entertainment, with music and movies and theater and dance, all these stories.

[00:03:46] And today with social media there are literally stories: Instagram stories, Facebook stories, LinkedIn stories. Maybe there are, I don't know. Stories anyway, everywhere. And the reason why we tell them is because they simply work. We get enchanted by them. We get lost in the stories. We understand why we get the stories. We get excited about the adventures and we really root for our heroes.

[00:04:17] At the end of the day, we feel like we're a part of the stories because we can relate, because we have got so much in the story and in the details of the story that we actually feel like we're a part of it. And this is where interesting things start to happen. When we come to that point, we can put the boots of our customers on in our mind and see what he needs to move forward. This is when we start to get really creative and really, really inspiring. This is where magic starts to happen.

Stories in business and the user story

[00:04:50] We tell stories all the time, not just as product managers but in the world of business. There are stories everywhere. We tell them in our long-term planning with visions and missions. We tell them in shorter-term planning with cross-functional things, with roadmaps and things like that. This is storytelling. We do it with marketing towards our customers, but we also do it with interviews with our customers, and we do it with the user testing that we do. All of this is framed around a storytelling format.

[00:05:23] We try to convince our stakeholders to do the next best things in story form. We want them to get along, to get aligned, and to be able to do it. And we break it down to the smallest little pieces here as well: user stories. We use stories every single day.

[00:05:43] I want to talk a little bit about storytelling, as you might have guessed, but I want to talk specifically about the user story, because I think there's so much power in this story, with all of what I've talked about in the power of storytelling, that we should really think about when we work with our user stories and work with our development and tech teams. Let's take this simple format that a lot of us know: as an X, I want Y so that I can Z. It's a simple format. You might write it a bit differently, but essentially this is the baseline for a simple user story, and we do these all of the time without even thinking about it. The base of our stories.

[00:06:28] Another way we could do this, just for comparison: once upon a time, there was a brave princess wanting to leave the kingdom and her evil stepmother so that she could travel the world and be happy. This is essentially the same thing, just written a little bit more fun, potentially. We have the X, the brave princess. We have the want, that she wants to leave. And we have the Z, which is that she wants to travel the world and be happy.

[00:07:02] Immediately, when you hear a story like this, you trigger something and you start to think: why is she brave? What makes her brave? Why is she not brave enough to leave the evil kingdom or the evil stepmother? Where does she want to go? Does she want to go by herself? I have a billion questions, and I wrote that, so I should know something else. I don't. That's all I know. Anyway, moving along.

The hero, the adventure and the happily ever after

[00:07:28] Let's start to break it down, to really dig into what these parts mean here. First things first: as X. Who is this story about? The user or the customer is always the hero. It's not you. It's not the developers. It's not the CEO. When we're talking about a feature that our customer is facing, everything is always about the user or the customer.

[00:07:59] What we want to do is understand him. We want to get the full picture, and we want to really dig into why and how and when and all of these things that we want to know. We want to be able to step into his shoes and really understand things. So what do we do here? Well, we get to know him. And how do we do that? We do it with all of these beautiful tools that we have. We have interviews. We do testing and surveys. We collect feedback, and we really try to get into the mind of our customers, to understand him and what he needs to do to conquer these adventures to the happily ever after.

[00:08:41] We create personas around him to make sure that we're able to communicate this with the rest of the company as well. We really want to paint these pictures of our users, our customers, because usually you don't have just one single type. Usually you have a few. But you want to make sure that you have these personas, and first of all that they are able to change with time, because they do. People evolve and things change. But also that we're able to really catch it and spread it to the rest of the company, so everybody gets to know him.

[00:09:17] Coming into the wants, the Y thing. This is actually the adventure. What are the things that our hero needs to move forward to the happily ever after? Might it be a new format of invoicing, or another way to contact customer service, or maybe a save-for-later feature or something like this? I have no idea what features you might have. But a few things could help you on the way here, to think about this in a little bit of a different way. Ask yourself: what are the challenges that our hero meets? Is it unclear invoice information, or is it a late delivered invoice? What is the actual thing that we need to fix for him to move forward?

[00:10:05] And then we also need to look at what roads he takes, because this is also where in the story he gets these problems. Is it when he logs in? Is it when he is on the payment side, or whatever side you might have? We need to figure this out to be able to really figure out what the customer needs here.

[00:10:24] With these two pieces, we come to the last piece in that little user story, which is: what is the Z? The happily ever after. This depends. If you have it as a user story, you have the goal, you have its target, you have a definition of done. But coming to things like the happily ever after for a company, this is the mission statement or the vision of the company, or your product vision. The happily ever after is something that is there and we must know it by heart. We must really feel it, because everything we do should boil down to the happily ever after.

[00:11:03] What we need to do here, when we have all of this definition of done and all of these things, is be clear. We need to know exactly what done means, or what success means. We have a clear definition, and we should set KPI targets, targets of where we want to reach and what we want to do. But also make sure that you talk to your customers. Direct feedback on new features is the best way to go. At the end of the day, you want to say, OK, we reached happily ever after, and here's the proof. That's what you need to do.

Losing the plot

[00:11:37] Having all of these pieces together, what we do as product managers is keep telling the story. We keep telling it to trigger other people's brains into this engagement and problem solving, to step into the customer's shoes, to be able to move in the right direction that will solve his problems and then lead to the happily ever after. This is what we do here.

[00:12:03] And there are times when you will get lost, because there are so many initiatives. There are so many great ideas out there, and there are simply so many things that we can do. We also have so many different people within the company, and we're all moving forward in the one direction towards the happily ever after. So we might get lost. We might simply lose track of our hero. It could be a new value proposition that targets new customers, new heroes to join the adventure, rather than the actual repeat customer that we have. Maybe we then forget about the repeat customer and we lose track of him.

[00:12:44] Or maybe there are too many stories being told at the same time. We do have different agendas if I'm working in product or if I work in marketing or in finance. Even if we all want the same thing, we do have different agendas on our table. This is a very easy way to lose the plot of the story, because we simply don't align on it well enough.

[00:13:05] Or we simply lose track of the happily ever after. This happens too. Or we're stuck in an old happily ever after: we've changed as a company, we've developed, so we want something else. Or we lost track of it completely. Or we mistook the happily ever after for happy right now, which is not the same thing. Happy right now is something that is happening at the moment, and happily ever after is something that expands over time. It's sticky and it's also continuous.

[00:13:33] So you will get lost. This happens. I remember sitting in a meeting on a super fun initiative that we wanted to do. Cross-functional, super intriguing brains in this room. And we were talking about how we're going to technically solve something, or how we're going to mark things in the system, and how we're going to figure out things that are not the actual problem that we wanted to solve, because we were so stuck in our own details on the problem rather than a user-friendly and hero-focused perspective.

[00:14:10] We didn't even talk about the customer until we had looped around a couple of times and we didn't get anywhere. And then we stopped and we were like, hang on, wait. Two questions. Who are we doing this for? And how is this helping him on his adventures with us to the happily ever after? That made us bounce right back on track in terms of understanding what we're doing and why we're doing it.

[00:14:34] This made me think, because we do have a great understanding of, and we take pride in knowing, our customers at Outfittery. We really do, and we do a lot of work around it. And we have a clear mission. And we still sat there and looped around, and we lost the story and we didn't know what we were doing, really, until we moved back and found it. So this made me think about how we ended up in that position and how we got there.

The writers' room

[00:15:04] And this made me think about The Simpsons, actually. Clearly that's where you go. The Simpsons, or actually a documentary about The Simpsons, which I saw so long ago I have no idea. But they were showing this room where all the writers get together and they write the stories, the episodes, in one room together. They lock themselves in with donuts and coffee or whatever they had, and then they just toss ideas around, toss jokes around. They feed off each other and they move around to make things happen. And bam, out comes an episode.

[00:15:41] I'm not saying that the episodes of The Simpsons are the most profound thing, but it's definitely storytelling, and it's definitely something that they do together. And this is the secret here: they do it together. They write it together. And they could only do this if they knew all the characters, all of the heroes, the whole Simpson family, the whole Springfield village. They could only do this if they knew the struggles, the challenges, the things that are coming along, and the happily ever after. And with their own specialties, they bring things together into a wider perspective.

[00:16:19] So the thing that we tend to forget is that we should write together. We should write it together, because we're all the writers in the story. We might be telling it, but we're not the only writers of it. Hard time to be a product manager: not only are you not the hero of the story, but you're also not the single writer of it. So what do we do? We keep telling the story, but we write it together.

Keep the focus on the hero and invite the writers

[00:16:47] So how do we do this? It's easy to talk about, easy to say. I have a few things that I think work really well and that are really interesting in terms of how to bring it into everyday life. Not just keep telling the story, which you should always do. But what do we do? We keep the focus on the hero. This is the most important. The user, the customer, is the star of the show. He is the hero. He is the one we're trying to get from point A to point B and be happily ever after with us.

[00:17:22] So this is what we do. But important here is to make sure that everybody gets to know him. Everybody knows the hero. And also keep talking to him. There's a lot of work in understanding and getting to know someone, especially a customer, so you need to really pay attention here and make sure that you have these discussions with him.

[00:17:46] Coming into the second point here, which is invite the writers. It's easy for us to be like, we're the storytellers, we're the voice, the customer's voice, blah, blah, blah. But we're also not writing it by ourselves. My absolute favorite thing to do in the world is to have a kickoff meeting. If I have an idea that I want to do, a change I want to make in a product, a new exciting idea, to make sure that I get the right input and the right information, I do a kickoff meeting, and do it as early as possible. That way you get everybody's knowledge, everybody's insights, worries, fears, joys, moments, whatever comes to mind in this kickoff meeting.

[00:18:33] You will get so many things out of that meeting that you don't have to go back and change at the end of the day. Plus, you're inviting everybody to be a part of the story from the beginning, so they will be excited and they will support you in this way. And keep the alignment meetings that you have, but add storytelling to them. Don't forget about it. Use the word hero. Use the word happily ever after. Trigger these things in people to get them to really focus on what we're doing here.

[00:19:05] This is what we wanted to come to: putting yourself into the shoes of the hero, to understanding. This is what we do and this is how we do it. And also hold them to it. If they want to be a part of it, hold them accountable. Make sure that they are coming in and really contributing to the story, and also that they understand and are getting to know the heroes as well.

Story-driven grooming

[00:19:32] Two things, coming to a third, which is my favorite: story-driven grooming. This is something that is a little bit time consuming, but it's a lot of fun and it gives so much energy to the team when you do it, because they come up with solutions that are better than the original thing that you might have had. One brain can only think so much.

[00:20:02] I will try to give an example here and see if it works. Let's say that this is the problem. It's a made-up problem, and I tried to make something that is universal. The customer tries to place a new order. He has not paid his last one, so he cannot do it. He gets sad and logs off, and there's no new order being made. One user story you could bring to your grooming here could look something like this: as a customer, I want an icon on orders I have not paid so that I know that I have to pay them.

[00:20:37] This is a terrible user story, in my opinion. I wrote it, so I'm allowed to criticize it. Here we're looking at something that is not very inspiring. There's some sort of solution in there that I'm not sure why it would be there. And we're also not solving the original problem even with this, because the customer is trying to order again, and that would be more of a happily ever after. Yes, we want him to pay, but we also want him to order. So this is not very good.

[00:21:08] Looking at "as a customer," there's also no relationship to who he is or what he does. There's nothing about him. And one crucial piece of information that we actually know is that this is a repeat customer. He has not paid his last order, so he's coming back again. This is a returning customer, and we do cherish them very much.

[00:21:29] Let's try to rewrite this one and see what happens. Again, there's a billion ways of doing this. This is just an attempt from my side to write it better, and I challenge you to find a better way. As a returning customer, I want to know if I have outstanding payments so that I can easily pay them and make my next order. This triggers more to discuss right here.

[00:21:58] This is what I would bring to the team. There are no solutions. There's just the things that I need to get to making the next order, to get to be happily ever after. I would bring this one. I don't bring the acceptance criteria. I don't bring any technical details. I bring this and we talk about this. And we start by doing what we did before: we break it down.

[00:22:21] Who's the customer? It's a returning customer. He wants to know if he has outstanding payments. OK. What is the challenge? That he doesn't get this information. Where is he coming from? What routes is he taking? Where can we find this problem for him? What do we need to change? Is it a user flow or is it something else? And then how do we make sure that he's also able to make a new order in this flow? It brings a lot of solutions. I thought about a few already, but that's not the point. The point is to have this discussion, to invite them to get engaged by the stories, to make sure that we're able to really make them put themselves into the shoes of the customer.

Write the story together

[00:23:05] This is where we want to get moving forward. We tell stories to inspire, to engage, and to trigger that problem-solving brain. To allow people to get into the shoes of the customer, to really empathize, so they know what to do to move forward. And the thing that we tend to forget is that we write it together. We should always invite people to this. Maybe not to write a user story together, but possibly make people write user stories. It's a really good exercise.

[00:23:45] And you keep telling this story about the customer, about his problems, about what we know about him, about how we're going to get from A to B to solve something. We just keep telling it. But this story changes all of the time, because we have new writers coming in with ideas and things to change, and we should keep this in mind.

[00:24:06] So I encourage you to try. This is where it starts, with once upon a time, and you do the rest. You fill it in. I would love to talk about it. It's so much fun when you see people getting engaged about the customer. I hope that I will see you later today at 6 p.m., so we can talk a little bit about storytelling, and maybe ideas that you have or struggles that you have, so we can really get inspired here, because there's a lot to tell. Thank you very much.