Story telling and the soul of your machine.
What makes a product worthy of love?
TL;DR
- If it is worth doing, isn’t it worth doing well.
- If you are building it for everyone, you are building it for no one.
- The best customer stories come from customers using our products and how that interaction changes and transforms their lives
- The best use cases are use cases embedded in rituals and traditions in customer lives. To do this well explore life arcs of customers, their aspirations, dreams and ambitions.
- Before building, ask two questions. Why and who?
- A 60 second video short based on a customer story is easier and faster to validate than business model and value proposition canvas.
- Nirvana is a flowing state of being. Not a summer fling.
- All a product wants is love. Make it worthy of love.
There is a common challenge I run into when I work with engineers, builders, developers and students. Everyone wants to get started with building and making things. Products and features. Timelines, schedules and resources. Tech, hardware and infrastructure. On your marks, set, spend. We know how to build, lets build.
To the swift and action oriented belongs the world. But there is a minor issue with the build first, aim later approach.
It misfires because we build products first and then find customers for them. I certainly did the first few times I built products for my employers and then for my own businesses.
Fortunately the disease is not terminal. It is easy enough to fix. Just ask yourself two questions:
One. Why should we build this ? The reason(s) for this product’s existence.
Two. Who are we building it for? The customers. Individuals, groups who we assume need and want this product.
Not exactly rocket science. Simple questions with simple answers. But there is a catch. There are answers and then there are answers.
How we attempt these questions determines our commitment to the craft of building products. Most founders know that they have to ask and answer who and why. And they do. Or they try. The problem lies with depths we go to seek truth and tools we use to answer and validate what we find.
We think answering the second question is relatively easier. Just use the business model canvas, the customer value canvas, a bit of design thinking and we are done.
Armed with an A3 sized template, three whiteboards, and a stack of sticky notes, how hard could it be?
Here is the most common answer I get to the second question when I teach product development. Often the first pass of budding and aspiring product managers and founders. Not just undergrad students.
Everyone. We are building it for everyone. Or everyone that matches a broad definition.
All students in a university. All travelers who use public transport. Everyone who reads a book or wants to write one. Everyone who dreams of a better life. Everyone who wants to fly. Everyone.
When you are building it for everyone, you are really building it for no one.
The most common answers I get to the first question?
a) A product comparison followed by I want to build a better x.
b) An existing product reference followed by I want to build a better x.
c) Because I want to. It is a good enough reason for me, I don’t need another.
There are answers and then there are answers. The ones above won’t get you where you want to be. The issue is not with tools, nor with our stars. The issue is with our practice of the craft.
Why and who? Who and why?
Why does it matter who we are building for?
The who and why is the soul of our machine. The soul defines how our creations engage and interacts with consumers.
Because the machine we build will not exist in isolation, it will engage and interact. Sometimes with other machines. Often with living breathing organisms. Shouldn’t we ask what they look like and what they want before we impose our will on them?
The who and why determine if we bring meaning to lives we engage and interact with. If our product is worthy of the acts of existence and creation. The soul of the machine speaks to customers. Sometimes connects at such a fundamental level that they fall hopelessly in love with our creation.
Let me give you an instance from my side of the world.
There is a dish that my mother (Ammi) makes that brings a great deal of meaning and joy to our family.
It is a popular spicy recipe from the Indo-Pak subcontinent. It traces its origins to army camps in Delhi from hundreds of year ago. A dish that was used to feed and put soldiers to sleep after a day of field battles. Heavy and rich in dissolved proteins and animal fat. What it should or should not include can generate instant outrage and intense conflict.
It is a basic dish which can be described as a tender beef stew. Yet it causes no end of trouble across the world. Calling Nihari a beef stew is like describing the Mona Lisa as a canvas, the Boston marathon as a long run, Catch 22 as a book, Covid-19 as a virus, or Chat GPT as software.
When Ammi makes Nihari, the ritual starts with selecting the right cut of meat and bones. Preparations start a week in advance including the notice that we will have it served next Friday.
Her measure of spices include a few heartful of love. The full mixture goes on the stove 3 days before it gets served. It cooks on slow heat for two of the those three days. The night before, pot lids are sealed with kneaded flour to lock flavors from spices within the stew.
When ready, we serve it with a mix of diced condiments and freshly baked tandoori bread. For a hardcore experience that does a number on your taste buds, have it with sips of piping hot tea.
On the day the seals are broken, you can smell the aroma all the way outside in the lane of our home. It is also a day when our family comes together.
Nihari becomes magical when you eat it with family and share it on a full table. Without family and the full table there is certainly flavor, but limited joy.
It is a tradition that has been passed on for generations in our family. Ammi’s elders gave her the gift. She passed on the recipe to us. Two of our children picked up on it. One made it for her host family in a different continent last weekend. Because when we lived in New York, Nihari centered meals brought a sense of family, celebration and home into our apartment from seven thousand miles away.
Four themes that you should note in the story above.
a) Ritual, process, tradition, recipe.
b) The why? Bringing families together. A shared experience that builds bonds steeped in historical tradition. A transfer of tradition to the next generation.
c) Joy. Meaning. Love.
d) Who? For the people Ammi loves, her siblings, children and grandchildren.
The soul? Because my mother takes a piece of her heart and mixes it in with the stew every time she makes it. Because of a few hundred years of tradition. Because of shared values and bonding over a full meal.
Because of love. For something to become worthy of love, one must start with a soul.
Customer stories, rituals, traditions.
Why would you bring something into the world without love? If it is worth doing, isn’t it worth doing well?
Why, because it is part of the grade. We wouldn’t graduate if we didn’t.
Honest answers in an undergrad class but points to the futility and frustration of attempting to ask and answer the why question.
What is your purpose and why do you exist are self awareness questions. Hard to answer and extract from fully grown adults. Teasing them out for products that are only paper blue prints is infinitely harder.
Story telling is a tool that helps shorten that journey. Stories are natural forms of expression that relate well with target audiences. We have grown up hearing stories. They may be difficult to craft but they go down well when sharing and explaining the essence of need, want and desire.
Where do customer focused stories come from?
Let’s go back to the why question for a second. Why would we want to tell a story? Because we want to better understand our customers? Why is that important? Because it will help us find the reason why our product should exist.
Customers and products. Customers engaging, interacting and using our product. That is the easiest starting point for customer stories.
Visualize your customers using your product and see where that leads. Be honest. When you visualize your customer, don’t visualize a stick figure. Perceive an individual with a life, personality, preferences, tastes and opinions. Add color, flesh and fashion. Sprinkle context, history, conflict. Real world is neither one dimensional, nor flat.
Then try these prompts:
a) How did your customers find your product?
b) What were they looking for when they found and used it?
c) How do they react? Are they delighted or pissed with what they find?
d) What is the source of customer delight? What is the source of their frustration and anger? How do you fix that?
e) What is the one thing you do to change their experience? Their perception and engagement?
f) How do they describe your product?
g) What is the common theme that binds your customers?
h) Where do you find these customers? What do you say to them when you find them? How is that relevant to their needs?
These will get the conversations started. But they won’t help us get where we need to reach. For that we need to walk a few miles in our customers shoes. Now ask:
a) What is their life like?
b) What are their aspirations and ambitions? Where are they going? Where do they need to be?
c) Who or what is holding them back from realizing their potential and their dreams?
d) What is the source of stress, tension, conflict in their lives? What makes them laugh out loud? What makes them cry?
e) What role do we play in their life arc? How does their life arc change once they discover our product?
If we want to spice up stories and make them effective look for the secret ingredient. Use customer journeys and life arcs to identify rituals, traditions and practices that bring meaning to their lives.
Where do we fit within the core of their lives? Rituals and traditions are the holy grail for product adoption and traction because if we can make product usage part of a ritual or tradition, we will never go to sleep hungry again. These customers will chase us to the ends of all worlds to continue using our product.
The same holds true for meaning. If our product helps achieve a goal that brings meaning to their life, we would touch, perhaps even change a life. Beyond being commercial, we do good.
I know you are going to point out the conflict here. How can we talk about soul on one end and being commercial on the other. How do you reconcile this conflict?
For the product to exist and continue to create meaning in customer lives, we the builders or founders, need an incentive to continue making it. Without a fair commercial exchange of value there is no reason for us or our investors to continue making the product.
But equally without meaning, there won’t be an incentive on our customers part to continue using the product.
We have been asking ourselves many questions. Let’s try choices. Would you rather:
a) Build something which is marginal and incidental to customers or build something which is central to their lives?
b) Build a product that customers use once and throw away, or build something they use every day, week or month of their lives?
This is not a trick question. The second choice is a better choice in both instances.
Seeking perfection. Intersecting worlds.
Nirvana is a flowing state of being. It is not a summer fling. It takes time and commitment to achieve. It takes effort to stay in that state. Once we have experienced it, we will never be happy, content or at peace in any other form.
For instance, take a cup of brewed coffee. And a good book.
Once we have tried a great cup or read a great book, it is difficult to settle for less. Once you have had Ammi’s Nihari you can no longer eat at Javed, Malik, Zahid or Sabri.
What binds book lovers and coffee lovers together? The love of coffee and the love of books. Also good coffee and good books go well together.
The ritual of making good coffee and finding a good book to read or even reading a book you have been looking forward to, are not that different.
You would think not, but there are similarities. And within those similarities lie the best stories.
Where do I find new beans to experiment with? Trusted friends and fellow coffee lovers.
How do I find new good books to read? Trusted friends and fellow book lovers.
How do I discover new flavors and authors on my own? By looking for related flavors and authors in related genres. Do you like crime noir? If you do, what is the nearest related space in terms of genre? Or new authors who focus on crime noir?
If you like medium roast beans, what’s is the nearest related flavor that you haven’t tried? Light or dark roast? Who do you ask?
As a coffee and book lover, would you prefer sunlit rooms with wide open spaces and greenery or dark, dingy, cramped quarters?
Choices matters. The ones we ask our customers to make tell them what they need to know about us and how well we understand or not understand their lives.
Would you prefer a quite, serene, peaceful coffeeshop with books that you can read? Smoking or non-smoking? A place where you can have a lazy but intelligent conversation or catch up with old friends?
Would you prefer a place filled with loud crowds going wild with rave music in the background? Or a place where you can sit for hours and loose all track of time.
There is craft, there is art, there is fusion and then there is blasphemy. I have never thought of myself as a conservative thinker but even I don’t think that coffee and rave mix at all.
How do I know, why do I say that? Maybe there is a version of the multiverse where rave and coffee go together?
I am sure there is. I am also sure it isn’t for me. Coffee, books, friendship, serenity. For me it goes so much farther than just beans or beverage. Coffee is personal. Personal because it meant and symbolizes recovering from Covid-19. It was the only thing I could have when physicians put me on steroids after fourteen days of fever so that I may live. Coffee meant not dying. And later, so did running. Together they represent my connection to the living.
Traditions and rituals. Find them in your customer lives. Focus on them in your stories.
Testing stories.
We have done our deep dive, we have dug out our stories from customer lives and we have written them. How do we know they work?
Shoot them in a 60 second short video format. Share them with your target customer profiles. See if your customers can relate. See if the stories connect. If they generate traction and conversions for your calls to action.
Why 60 seconds? Because shorter stories are much harder to write than longer ones.
The reason why we prefer visual stories over business model and value proposition canvases is abstract tools are harder to present and test against target audiences.
Stories too are abstract but we are comfortable with parsing and processing them. If they connect with customers, they connect instantly. That validation is much harder and takes longer to achieve with other tools.
A quick test. Which one would you prefer? The business model canvas and value proposition canvas below:
Or, this short YouTube clip on breaking free, shared dreams and running?
Which one gets the point across faster?
The canvasses are easier to build and prepare. The video is much harder and expensive to conceptualize, shoot, edit and produce. And yet the complexity of message that the video addresses, paper can only aspire for.
Testing and validating the video is much easier than other options. You either make a connection, or you don’t. If you do, great; if you don’t start over again.
There is one quick qualification we need to make. A video gut punch is only possible because of the bones of the story behind it. Yes production values make it stand out. However great production teams are a necessary but not sufficient requirement.
Sometimes stories are so powerful, that you don’t need a video. A simple landing page would serve you just as well. Here is the story that came out of the canvasses shared above for our reader revenue ad supported product.
The issue is not with our tools. It is with our practice of the craft.
The key is identifying and focusing on the essence. What is the essence of your story? What is the point?
The essence of Nihari is family and love.
The essence of a good cup of coffee is the craft behind the cup. Which cup has more craft? A cup brewed and put together by a maestro, or one put together by a pod processing machine in a hotel room?
The essence of a good book? Five thousand years of history behind writing and expression.
When we bring friendship or a good book into coffee’s orbit, gravity shifts from the craft to relationship and experience. We don’t lose the essence but flavor and craft become less important than conversation.
Essence is not static or one dimensional. It reacts and changes depending on which world you are in. If you are all in, on the edge or at the intersection. We add color to our worlds when we explore intersections.
Essence is hard. It is not about features, product or process. It is about purpose, feeling, emotions, behavior, triggers, needs and desires.
What would be the essence of a long form economic analysis site focused on Pakistan’s economy? Pick one of the two choices below:
News analysis that reads like a million dollars. As good, sometimes better than the coffee you are reading it with.
News commentary has agendas, biases and paid interests. What if it didn’t?
Would you prefer 75 words (the original slide above) that say nothing about purpose? Or a single line that zeroes into it?
If you are confused about the essence of products, use a simple test. Essence is not about convenience, saving money, reducing clicks to checkout, shortening time or distances. These are nice to have, but they are not essence. Essence is more. Essence changes and transforms lives.
Find the essence of what you want to build. Give it a soul. Color in your flavors. Then test and validate it.
Remember, in the end all a product wants is love. Make it worthy of love.
References
- Build. An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. Tony Fadell, 2022, Harper Collins.
- Start at the end. How to build products that create change. Matt Walleart, 2019, Portfolio.
- The seven deadly sins of story telling, Jennifer Aaker, Stanford, GSB. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/jennifer-aaker-seven-deadly-sins-storytelling
- How to shoot video that don’t suck. Steve Stockman, 2011, Workman Publishing.
