If you are closely associated with digital product management, you must realize that storytelling has recently become a buzzword. In one way or another, it is used by great product design companies in every phase of the product cycle – from product ideation to its marketing. The good news is, you can use the art of storytelling in your daily life to design amazing products and scale your business to the next level.
But before getting a little deeper into this subject, let’s first explain why storytelling is so important!
Storytelling helps you explain complicated concepts easily
Since human beings are wired to understand patterns more quickly than facts and figures, storytelling enables you to explain concepts quite easily and ensure that your customers remember it. Plus, stories make the world more meaningful. Research shows that human brains can easily detect patterns in visual forms like figures, faces, flowers, or speech. Due to this reason, stories are not only meaningful, but they also give us a natural vibe.
Whether you are in the middle of the product cycle or you are just brainstorming your basic idea, you can take advantage of the storytelling aspect to communicate among your core team and explain the concept to other major stakeholders. Storytelling plays a critical role when explaining your idea to your target audience. So why not avail this skill, particularly when you are good at it?
It strengthens shared understanding
Using the art of storytelling with data enables you to create a shared understanding with your team members. It can better generate a shared understanding of the concept, situation, subject, or problem you want to address.
And, just because storytelling is engaging in nature, it can grab your audience’s attention and maintain it and allow them to make meaningful connections with themselves and your business.
Storytelling helps you to keep things focused while helping you bring user pain points to the forefront of the conversation. It leads to the creation of a shared understanding of why you are building a specific product in the first place and who will benefit from it.
Stories help us empathize
As much as it is relatable, storytelling helps us see the world with the eyes of others. In terms of product design, it enables you to explore and understand the target audience’s needs to craft and design products that can better address their problem and find the perfect solution for them. When everyone in your team has a shared understanding of the basic concepts, the whole team will better understand the goals of the business, particularly in relation to the target audience. Secondly, you can infuse empathy into your product development process using the art of storytelling, and it can be very beneficial for the team of designers.
Whenever we hear stories, our brain is tricked into thinking that we are part of the story. So, for example, the empathy that we show to a character is the same as that to a real person.
How product design companies can use storytelling in a product design process
Trust me, the art of storytelling in your business can do some magic! It allows you to communicate with the top executives and the other product development team members in an effective manner. According to the agile framework, to build an incredible product, you will need to have a common ground with your target audience and create a user story. A significant part of the agile approach is shifting the focus from writing to discussing your requirements.
So once your team knows the user story, then they will know why you are building the product and what value it will create. Product design companies use storytelling because it encourages creativity, collaboration, and a better product overall.
Plus, if you want to sketch out your product roadmap, it can also be a big story where the major characters are your team members. What’s more, when you are planning to make a roadmap presentation for your stakeholders, you should think this way.
Storytelling as a marketing tool
Today’s digital noise has made it hard to grab the target audience’s attention. Given this, the art of storytelling is getting even more critical than ever before, which can help you catch attention. But hold on; it is not always about the attention, but also about the awareness.
One thing that I have learned throughout my career is, most people rely more heavily on their emotions and feeling when making buying decisions. The simplest and most effective way to use storytelling is by paying attention to the problems your users face.
Know that the best stories often emerge from your target audience itself. Uncover community-driven stories and turn them into an amazing product development process.
