Strategy Storytelling: The Product Narrative Canvas

Let’s talk about how to elevate your product strategy with an outcome-driven storytelling model.

When it comes to discussing and evangelizing product strategy, proper framing and delivery is critical for sharing knowledge and engaging audiences. It’s why product managers are intuitively drawn to the construct of a story when they are thinking about conveying product strategy.

After all, doesn’t a good story make the message more relatable and compelling? A well-articulated product strategy has the power to motivate, inspire, and even sell.

Product managers have the responsibility to educate partners and collaborators on the key points of product strategy throughout all stages of a product’s life.

A product strategy faces the unique challenge of serving both its organization’s interests and user/market interests simultaneously. By their nature, product strategies are conceptually dense and require tons of supporting context. The ability to articulate product strategy well shouldn’t be taken for granted.

If you’re a product manager with some experience, you probably already know how easy it is to debilitate a product strategy discussion with poor framing and convoluted explanations. You may have experienced how unsettling it can be when a client or stakeholder “isn’t getting it” and launches a series of pointed, derailing questions. If not, well then we’ve all seen someone bomb on Shark Tank.

Even the most brilliant strategies aren’t going to explain themselves; they also require and deserve well-crafted storytelling. It goes without saying that one of the most important skills for a product manager to develop is the art of presenting product strategies.

Over the years, I’ve found that the magic formula for high-impact product strategy presentation is to utilize a [product narrative] + [system of stories] approach.

You might be wondering: “how is a narrative different from stories?” and “what is a system of stories?”. Let’s address those important questions.

• A good story has characters with motivations driving them to action, a plot, events transpiring, and a resolution.
• By contrast, a narrative is a contextual container for a system of stories (credit to Tamsen Webster for these definitions).

“System of stories”

In a product strategy context, “system of stories” refers to the idea that a product strategy typically reflects a plan to pursue more than just one strategic outcome. Each outcome can be told as its own story. The synergy between these stories reflects a higher level of strategy that ties directly to the organizational mission.

While storytelling techniques will bring product strategies to life in the most relatable and engaging way, an overarching product narrative creates leverage by supplying critical “bigger picture” context.

More practically, establishing a product narrative reduces the need to pause and explain background details about specific points of strategy. This improves conversational flow, maintains audience engagement, and creates more powerful “ah ha!” moments.

Let’s explore the [product narrative] + [system of stories] concepts in detail:

The Product Narrative Canvas

The Product Narrative Canvas is inspired by the popular business model and product positioning canvases, but it is adapted to support what product leaders spend far more time on — evangelizing product strategy.

A product narrative captures several higher-order concepts and unifying themes about your organization. While product strategies will evolve and need to be re-told periodically, the broader product narrative will remain constant. And where product strategies typically have a 6–12 month time horizon, a product narrative is open-ended and should remain relevant for many years.

I developed the Product Narrative Canvas as a guide to capturing the essential points of context to support product strategy storytelling. It’s about understanding that high-impact strategy storytelling needs to establish credibility while appealing to logic and emotion.

I’ll explain each facet of the canvas in more detail:

Position your organization

Discuss your organization’s ethos, passions, and competencies as they relate to the product you offer. These organizational details should inspire trust that your organization is well-suited to provide this product.

Portray your vision

Inspire your audience with an idea of the fully realized, value-added, end state of your product. What will the lives of the personas in your market look like after your product has changed them? A product vision typically reflects a 3–10 year time horizon.

Convey unique insights and truths held

Explain uniquely held knowledge and convictions that guide and empower your organization through its product mission. Do you have access to mission critical insights or proprietary data that other orgs don’t have? An “earned secret”, so to speak?

Articulate the market-level challenge

As it pertains to the value proposition of your product, what are the unmet needs, problems, and unfulfilled desires that your market faces? Are they indeed urgent and pervasive problems with a market willingness to pay for a solution?

Your articulation of the market-level challenge should reinforce the reality of the problem in your audiences’ minds. What you share should both elicit emotion and inspire confidence that you thoroughly understand your market’s needs.

Declare your mission

Explain your commitment to solving the market level problem by way of your direction, goals, and guiding principles. Do you have an “unfair advantage” in solving this market problem that other organizations don’t possess?

In contrast to a product vision, a mission will typically have a 6–18 month time horizon. Your product mission should relate directly to the “golden thread” of synergy and unifying themes across your product strategy. Read more about this below.

Position your product

As captured in the popular product positioning template, a positioning statement brings together: 1) target market, 2) market’s desired benefits/outcomes, 3) your product identity, 4) relevant product categorization, 5) solution/reason to buy, 6) acknowledgement of category competitors, 7) key points of differentiation.

Since the rest of the elements of Product Narrative Canvas have established credibility and appealed to your market’s emotions, this positioning statement may simply capture the logical conclusion that your product is the right one for this market, challenges faced, and solutions desired.

Note again how the six elements of the Product Narrative Canvas address above speak to one or a combination of credibility, logic, and emotion.

Here’s what a completed canvas looks like

The following is an example of a Product Narrative Canvas for a hypothetical custom ski boot fitter serving skiers in Utah’s Wasatch range:

“Why us?” “Why now?”

In addition to the six foundational prompts included in the canvas, I encourage product managers to consider two more questions:

1. “Why us?” as an extension of organizational positioning (as opposed to any other organization) and,
2. “Why now?” as an extension of the market level challenge and unique insights

In highly competitive and/or complex market ecosystems, your organizational positioning may need a finer point of distinction from other potential competitors. For example, I once worked for a smaller organization which competed with offerings from Google. We recognized that Google could potentially deploy competitive resources that far exceeded ours at any point. It was critical for us to have a crystal clear answer to “Why Us?” relative to Google that went beyond our ethos, passions, and core competencies.

Similarly, market ecosystems may evolve such that there are narrow windows of opportunity for some products to enter and become successful. If this condition applies to your market or product, build on your narrative’s unique insights and articulation of the market challenge to address the “Why Now?” timeliness of your solution.

The elements of a product narrative are equally at home in a pitch deck for prospects or investors as they are in conversations with a cross-functional product development team. They should be an aligning, inspiring, and motivating force internally within an organization.

Be outcome-oriented

When it comes to strategy storytelling, the first and most important principle is to be outcome-oriented. Keeping it “outcome-level” elevates the conversation to matters of “why” and leaves room for the best solutions to be discovered and optimized over time.

A good outcome-driven story has characters with motivations driving them to action, a plot, and a resolution. Product storytelling should leverage the same constructs.

Here’s how the story constructs relate to product strategies:

• Characters are the personas in your target market for whom your product delivers value.
• Plots form around the unaddressed needs, problems, and desires held by the characters in your market.
• Resolutions are the positive outcomes your product enables characters to realize against their needs, problems, and desires.
• The Golden Thread is the unifying theme across your system of synergistic, outcome-driven stories. The golden thread is what ties your product strategy to the mission you established in your narrative.

For example…

Let’s explore this plot with the following characters:

“Parents want to share safe entertainment experiences with their family.”

- Story/Outcome 1: increase kid and family-friendly content

- Story/Outcome 2: improve family-friendly content discoverability

- Story/Outcome 3: expand parental controls

- Golden Thread: provide families the best and safest entertainment platform

And what if we express our outcome-oriented strategy in terms of the users choice of our product in the future:

“I use [entertainment platform] because it provides the best and safest entertainment for families.”

This framing is powerful because it forces the storyteller to externalize the impact of strategic outcomes on users’ product preference. It brings forward the assumption of desirability for closer examination.

Always establish context

I always suggest that product managers and product leaders get a firm grip on the elements of the Product Narrative Canvas before focusing on strategy storytelling. These elements must be in place to establish context and create leverage. This should absolutely be done collaboratively with senior business stakeholders.

With the narrative elements in place, you can move on to developing framing for strategic outcomes in terms of the characters (personas) involved and the plots (unmet needs/desires/problems) they face.

It will always be necessary to tailor your strategic stories to your unique product and market. Similarly, it’s reasonable to tailor product strategy discussions based on the audience and the amount of context they already have. For example — a strategy discussion with a seasoned engineer will most likely be quite different than with a new client or prospect.

Successfully articulating this context sometimes takes a few words or sentences, but it can make an enormous difference for your audience.

Don’t forget to highlight key synergies between the outcomes you’re pursuing and/or the resources you plan to deploy. I wish you the best with crafting the best stories to ensure product strategy success.

I would like to thank Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor of Product Coalition, for his valuable contributions to the editing of this article.

I also thank Product Coalition founder Jay Stansell, who has provided a collaborative product management education environment.