Praerit Garg is President of Product & Innovation at Smart sheeta business platform for modern task management.
There is endless advice on how to improve and maximize your product management strategy. The internet is full of articles, podcasts and tutorials that promise to share the recipe for success and reveal the secret ingredients to better product management in your organization.
But there’s one ingredient that’s rarely mentioned—and in my experience, it’s the most important. This ingredient is storytelling: both for your product and for your customers.
To strengthen your product management strategy, you need to be able to tell the story of who exactly your customers are and, ultimately, how your product helps improve their lives. As in any good story, character development matters. We need to be able to connect with the characters, so to speak, and empathize with them and their needs.
Storytelling is your “why”: why your product exists and why people use your product to achieve their goals. If your entire organization is aligned with your product story, it will strengthen your product management strategy and provide clearer direction and motivation behind your product roadmap.
Here are two strategies to strengthen your organization’s storytelling abilities.
Start by defining the customer problem you’re trying to solve.
Any product update should ultimately be directly linked to a customer issue or customer feedback. At the outset, ask whether the proposed update provides unique and timely value and whether it will deliver at the level your customers expect. Keeping customers at the center of your product development process will filter out the noise that would otherwise distract from your main priorities.
In Smartsheet, for example, every product update starts with a “Customer Problem Definition” or CPD document. As the name suggests, it includes details about the customer and the problem we intend to solve for them, as well as direct customer offers. CPD is kept front and center throughout the development process, keeping the team customer-focused from start to finish.
By trying to thoroughly understand customer problems in this way, teams are better equipped to identify what needs to be solved before even starting down the road of designing any features and capabilities.
Collaborate in teams for more meaningful stories.
Product management is all about collaboration, and improving your storytelling is no different. Product-driven storytelling efforts will only be successful if product, engineering, and marketing and communications teams work closely together.
The product and engineering teams have deep knowledge of customer pain points and how the product solves them. Marketing and communications teams excel at sharpening these stories and bringing them to life for a wider audience—including potential customers.
When marketing and technical teams work more closely together to tell the human side of the story behind a change you make to the product, product management decisions will matter more to both current and potential customers.
Product management strategies vary from company to company depending on size, industry, and goals, but I believe this applies to every organization: Defining the story about who your customers are, what their challenges are, and how your product helps solve these challenges will allow your teams to stay focused and aligned—ultimately delivering value to your business and empowering your customers to do even more.
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