Petra Wille: evaluation

Transcript context

…Cool. I'm excited. I'm going to watch that one again. That's a good reminder. Maybe just another question around storytelling. Say you're a PM and you're about to start a document or a deck and you just want it to be a good story, what are two or three things you should just do to set yourself up for success? Yeah. First of all, don't sit in front of the blank page for too long, just start drafting something. I think there's a lot of beauty in story as a design tool, so to say, because it's even easier to change a story than it is to change a prototype, right? So even before you put something in writing, you could start talking about it and see how it lands and then tweak it. And I think that's the first thing, get going. And then the other thing is go start talking about your story, go test it, see how it resonates, and then tweak it. And maybe you could use one of the proven story structures, find the one that helps you most. Really, even if it's super boring, but I'll use this hero's journey a lot where I think about, should I put the team in the heart of the story? Because if it's a story that should help me to motivate the team or to inspire the team to actions or something like that, then maybe it's nice if I put them in the center of the story and make them the heroes and talk about the demons and monsters they have to fight to once arrived at this brighter future. And maybe some other times, it makes sense to put the user there and really talk about how their world and lives would have improved once this product is out and available. Or maybe it's even a feature that we're talking about or a bigger redesign or whatever you're currently working on, right? But you could use this proven story structure and see what are the things in there. So the call to adventure, what is the call to adventure? What is this bright future? And it helps you to start and to get going. And then I usually advise people to have the story handy in various formats. So spoken that you could actually talk about it. Written, because we all tend to work in remote or asynchronous environment. So just a recorded video maybe. Yeah, it's good, but maybe a written version of it is nice as well. And the next one is an illustration that helps you making some of the core points of your story visible to the audience. And that could be a whiteboard drawing, a flipchart drawing. It could be a bigger, maybe it's five slides with emotional pictures on it or whatever it is, but be visual with your story as well. And then you should have it ready in three different formats in a super short 75-second elevator pitch version. In the six minutes, I can do this before we actually start planning version. And ideally, I have to go to the company all-hands and have to talk about what we will look into for the next four months. And that's maybe an 80 minutes version. And 80 minutes is the length of an average TED Talk, and there is a reason for that. It has to do with attention spans and all these kind of things. So that's why I advise people to use this three length. An example you're using there is a PM designing the vision for their team potentially or their strategy for the next, say, six months, right?…

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