Nancy Duarte: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, can never be anyone else. It's a challenge, but yeah, don't know, it worked out. Okay. Actually, real final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round. Have you seen examples of product managers specifically telling really good stories? The product management process has multiple phase. There's the creative explorative process all the way through to getting it produced. And I think story can take you along in each phase. So, there's example, which I read about, I wasn't actually even part of, but Brian Chesky at Airbnb, there was a whole article where he unpacked this moment in their product development cycle where they decided they would take a walk in the shoes of their customer and they hired a Pixar illustrator to illustrate each scene as the team's like, okay, okay, they said this is her name. And they were like, okay, what happens? Her alarm goes off. Okay, what happens next? What happens next? Okay, now she's decided she needs to book something. What does she do? She wants to do that. They realized from this little walk in the shoes of their customer just this day in the life, which is a classic storytelling method for any product, they realized that they had their strategy wrong, that they needed to move as soon as possible to a mobile first strategy. And it was just because they actually thought about, okay. She goes, brushes their teeth, they do this. They were just literally walking through the life of their ideal customer and that was when they realized they had it all messed up. But the other phases, after all this work people put into product and the making of the product and the managing of pushing it through. We have a large client that makes shoes or athletic things. I love telling stories, but I can't say this. And there's this moment where we get brought in and could you please train our product people in story? We're like, "What's the big problem?" They're like, "They'll spend a year or two on a shoe and be like, chunk, put it on the table. And they're like, what do you have to say about it?" They're like, "It's red." And it's like all these years of investment, all these years, they couldn't unpack any sort of story or any sort of reason or even their passion for why they chose red. And it was like, here's my shoe, it's red. And so this ability to move things along by adding meaning or why and then wrapping it in a story actually can get a product chosen or rejected or there's just so many examples of different spaces in the product cycle that could benefit from a really well told story from, like I said, how the products innovate in the roadmap all the way through to what gets accepted. And then the big reveal, you think about even all the big Apple launches, it's about a big product reveal. It's about revealing this thing that had been hidden for so long and it's another moment to tell amazing stories. So, that's kind of a little bit of an insight on the product side of how to use story. The Airbnb example is an awesome example. It's all true. When I joined Airbnb is actually right there in the process of doing that.…

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