Throughout our entire lives, we’re surrounded by stories. When you think about it, they’re everywhere and most of our knowledge of the world and the way it works comes from stories. It’s like our minds are hardwired to listen to stories, visualise them, and use elements of story telling to engage with the world and educate ourselves. From the earliest days of human existence, there’s not a single culture that hasn’t used inspiring narratives to feed people’s curiosity.
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The Importance of Story Telling in the Business Environment
Stories are important as we use their events and heroes to associate ourselves with the real-life things they represent. Through those connections and the way our senses react to them, those things leave a lasting impression and become easier to remember. And, this is exactly why story telling is such a potent tool in a business environment.
For business analysts and product managers, it’s much easier to get all stakeholders
, from end users to organisational leadership, on board with a certain product or project if they have an engaging narrative to go with it. Story telling skills are a powerful weapon in the arsenal of everyone who tries not only to get the product on the market but to make its development process as efficient as possible and help it thrive once it reaches the customers.
How Story Telling Can Help Product Managers and Business Analysts?
Product managers and business analysts focus on different things, with the former striving to create a valuable and feasible product and the latter focused on developing the business capabilities of the organisation. However, people in both roles can use story telling to make their work more efficient and achieve set goals with more success.
Story Telling for Product Managers
For product managers, story telling can serve as a valuable instrument that can make their job easier and more effective in a couple of different ways. Creating narratives can help them align their team around end users’ needs, pitch the product to customers, and develop an effective framework for interaction with customers and their engagement with the product.
Story Telling To Align The Product Team With What The Customer Wants
The product development process is the most successful and effective when the teams involved put their focus more on the people who will be using the product, rather than on the product itself and its features. From the moment it’s conceived, the product strategy should be user-centric.
This means that the product managers and their teams shouldn’t prioritise the output or the deliverable, but concentrate on the outcome or what the user can achieve by using the product and how it will change their behaviour.
Creating stories around the product helps the team answer the questions of why are they making the product and who they’re making it for, thus putting the human at the centre of the development process. Story telling allows developers to see the big picture surrounding the product that is still based on the specific details about people that will be using the product.
Story Telling Can Help Pitch The Product To The Customer
The story telling framework used to make the customer the focus of the development process can also serve as a powerful marketing instrument for pitching to those customers.
So, the elements of the previously created story should be integrated into the marketing pitch with the message crafted in a way that makes the end user the hero of the story and successful resolution of the story arc leads to their full satisfaction with the product.
For the product to perform well in the market, the product manager should work with other teams, including the marketing department, to ensure that the unified and holistic vision of the product is maintained.
Story Telling Can Create A Framework For Customer Engagement
The two most important principles of customer engagement – making the user hero of the story and shifting the focus on the problem instead of the solution, should already be incorporated in the story created during the product development process.
Therefore, a product manager should already have a ready-made instrument for creating a framework for interaction with the customers, even though it works somewhat indirectly. Using elements of the story while interacting with customers can be very helpful in guiding the users in the right direction and having them fully engaged throughout every step of the product journey.
Story Telling for Business Analysts
Business analysts can also find story telling techniques very useful, mainly to easily convey critical and complex information to all interested stakeholders and explain to people with different backgrounds and levels of involvement why the change is needed and what it entails. There are several crucial opportunities when BAs can utilise stories and leverage them in their work.
Story Telling Can Help Define A Business Need
Often the projects that could be highly beneficial to the organisation don’t even get off the ground as those in a position to allocate resources don’t recognise the need for a change or don’t even seem able to recognise the problem in the current state of the organisation.
Business analysts who are able to identify opportunities or uncover problems are highly valuable to any organisation, but they still have to convey these business needs to those higher in the organisational hierarchy. This is where story telling comes in as a great and efficient way to present those needs to the higher-ups and get them invested and interested enough to the point that they decide to sponsor a certain business case.
Story Telling Can Be Used To Document And Communicate Requirements
The requirements are often best represented in the form of user stories. Commonly, they don’t need to be complex and long narratives, but rather simple and short stories efficiently explaining what the business needs to address and why.
Plus, stories can be utilised to condense more complex requirements as the analysis of the current state often involves going over multiple processes and documenting numerous requirements. Using storytelling, a business analyst can summarise all these detailed requirements into the main challenges the organisation is facing.
Story Telling Makes It Easier To Secure Stakeholders Buy-In
One of the greatest challenges of every business analysis project is getting everyone that matters on board with the proposed change. Successful communication with stakeholders is necessary for the successful implementation of the solution and for making sure it realises its full potential.
However, business analysts and their proposed solutions are often met with resistance and forced to justify why the project should even exist. Describing why a certain project is valuable and why it matters for the stakeholders is easiest done through engaging and effective stories.
The story should feature the problems stakeholders may be facing and a resolution that will address those issues and show how they can be solved through the implementation of the proposed solution.
Benefits of Story Telling
As you can see from everything written above, story telling techniques can be highly beneficial to the organisation. Below are the crucial reasons why story telling is so powerful and the main ways an organisation can benefit from properly utilising this technique.
Stories Bring People Together
Stories have an unmatched power to brand and bring people together. Even when looking at the biggest picture possible we see that every major religion and every nation’s identity in the world is formed around stories that bring people together in a community.
Of course, stories work like this on a smaller scale, too, meaning that, in cooperative environments, story telling can be used in a similar way. Stores can be made about the company’s founder, customers, or employees.
The entire organisational vision can be represented through stories that connect it to the company’s mission and make sure that everyone works towards the common goal and understands their role within the organisation.
Stories can Connect Data and Information to Real-life Experience
In the modern business environment, everyone involved is often overwhelmed by the amount of available data and information on every aspect of business operations. However, all that information and data don’t mean much on their own.
To make them useful, we have to interpret them and help people make opinions based on them which would prompt them to undertake certain actions and engage in certain behaviours to the benefit of the organisation.
Stories, when utilised properly, work to bridge the “experience gap,” and connect the data with the real experiences of stakeholders, employees, or customers, This story-based approach then turns all that available information into a powerful motivational force guiding the feelings and behaviours of the intended audience towards the desired goal.
Stories Bring Shared Understanding
No matter the organisational level, conveying the desired message so that everyone can understand it is a major challenge, particularly for business analysts, product managers, and similar positions whose projects often depend on securing the buy-in from everyone involved in the process.
Great story telling can turn abstract concepts and complex solutions into something that is accessible to everyone and, at the same time, help them understand those concepts in a way that will lead them to generate action.
When everyone in the intended audience, which may include company leadership, development teams, other employees, and end users, shares an understanding of a certain concept achieving the desired outcome is much easier.
How to Create a Great Story?
Just like any other form of story telling, each story used in the business environment has the same basic components, regardless of what exactly the narrative is supposed to achieve.
Story Telling Structure – Core Components of a Story
Character
For starters, every story should feature a character or more of them who serves as an entry point that will relate the audience to the story. If your customers are your intended audience, it will be much easier to get them to respond to your call to action if they can relate to the story’s character.
Conflict
Secondly, the story needs some sort of conflict where the character will overcome certain challenges. This way, the story can elicit emotions and help the audience engage and connect to them through relatable experiences of their own.
Resolution
Finally, no story is complete without resolution. It usually provides context to the conflict and characters, wraps up the story, and typically includes a call to action.
Basic Principles of Story Telling in a Business Environment
Be Clear on the Purpose
Before even starting to work on a story, you should ask yourself what is your vision for the product or process you’re creating the story about and, even more importantly, why is that product being developed, who are you developing it for, and how is it suppose to solve a certain problem. The What, Why, Who, and How explain the reason behind the product and help everyone get motivated to develop that product and bring it to the customers.
Define the Problem
We already mentioned that every good story has a conflict at the centre of it. In business story telling, the customer’s problem is the central conflict of the story. So when creating a story, it’s necessary to define that problem by answering the question of what the user wants, why they want it, and what is their pain point. Once the problem is defined, it’s easy to use story telling to communicate to the rest of the team and all other interested stakeholders.
Use Personas in the Plot
The plot of the story should connect the characters to certain plot points. In business story telling, this means defining user personas and explaining why the specific feature matters to them, how a certain product feature relates to their problems, or what is the motivation behind their feature request. Plus, you’ll need to determine when, why, and in which context the customer will use a certain product or its feature.
Let Stakeholders Be Ready to Hear the Solution
All stories end, and if you have managed to create a good story, then the resolution to the central conflict should come naturally. Effective story telling should have all the involved stakeholders already invested in the story at this point and more than ready to hear your solution and motivated to work to achieve it.
Use Personal Connection
You shouldn’t forget that for a story to produce the desired effect, it needs to elicit emotions. To do so, it’s necessary to establish a personal connection to its intended audience as that is the only way you’ll get customers to buy a product or stakeholders within the organisation to get on board with your solution.