Technology vendors invest an enormous amount of time, money, and emotion to develop and deliver products. As a result, product roadmap communications tend to focus first on great new product capabilities or features, with limited effort to link them to business benefits and usage scenarios.
Communicating in this way about products often does not help external and internal audiences see their relevance and therefore they struggle to fully commit to the vision that technology providers describe. These technology vendors will often assume that audiences, especially those within the organization, will share the same enthusiasm and understanding for product details as product developers.
In reality, all stakeholders, whether internal or external, evaluate the message through the lens of what it means to them; This can make it difficult to get buy-in and engagement from other stakeholders, such as sales, marketing, channel partners, or customers.
Product storytelling implies a lot more about a product than just its features, including why the company created the product, the changes it has made to its customers' jobs, and where the product is headed. The product vision should start with a clear purpose and solve a real challenge.
1. Use O-SIR during product narration.
Communicating your product portfolio vision is fundamentally about telling a story about change. An effective structure for change stories is called outcome-situation-impact-resolution or O-SIR.
The core of O-SIR is a structure that starts with the customer's situation, describes the impact of the current state, and then closes with how the technology provider's vision will solve it.
- Result (O): Start with a short, results-oriented title, sentence, or passage that states the value achieved when the vision becomes a reality. This effectively foreshadows the rest of the story, creating a reason for the reader/listener to pay closer attention and think, “I want to know more.”
- Situation (S): Describe the current situation before the new vision is implemented. What is the big problem that will be addressed for customers and for the organization (and maybe even for society, depending on the company's mission or purpose statement)?
- Impact (me): This is the most commonly omitted element of the story. Impact is the clear articulation of the pain, cost, or risk that the current situation is causing. It should help create urgency and establish why a change is important. Provides the opportunity to make an emotional call for change. Without impact, technology providers expect the audience to already know what it is or make the connection on their own.
- Resolution (R): Once it has been established that the current situation presents enough pain or risk, technology providers can take the audience to a better place by describing how their product vision will solve the problem. As part of the resolution, address the key problems being faced “the old way” and how this way is an improvement.
The format creates a framework that sets the context and helps the audience see their role in the vision: they see how they can become protagonists. Once technology providers have the structure, they add an openness that generates immediate interest in learning more.
2. Use product stories that address key audience issues and concerns.
Don't avoid generating emotions in communications: audiences engage with ideas, people and things on an emotional level. If technology providers want to drive action, they need to make an emotional connection, because decision making and action are actually driven by the part of our brain that is responsible for making emotional connections. It's the purpose-driven elements of the product vision and story that will really drive engagement and action: the “why” of the product rather than the “what” of it.
3. Help the audience move from vision to action during product storytelling.
If vision is what technology providers want their product experience to be for the customer, strategy is how they intend to achieve that vision. Conveying a message of change, such as a new vision, requires a communication cadence that allows the high-level vision to be absorbed and accepted first.
When working on product stories, don't try to communicate everything at once; If technology providers explore this path, they run the risk of audiences becoming overwhelmed and likely disengaging. This is especially true when communicating significant changes.
Taking timing into account also allows technology providers to anticipate immediate and long-term concerns that could arise among stakeholders. Time will also affect how the message can be interpreted from the point of view of a specific functional area. Technology providers can create responses to these concerns through progressive communications.
4. Create different product stories for different stakeholders.
To communicate the vision more broadly, technology vendors will need different versions of the product story for different stakeholder groups, such as sales, marketing, channel partners, or customers.
Build authentic stories that address their situation and make them feel that their needs and points of view have been considered in the broader process. When the product story is contextualized toward specific audiences while maintaining a strong connection to the core “why” of the story, technology providers achieve consistency and better connect with different stakeholders.
Many technology vendors communicate their product direction by talking about features, but it is the purpose of the product that inspires commitment and enthusiasm. Those who take a product storytelling approach will inspire internal stakeholders, ecosystem partners, and customers.
This article was written by Clifton Gilley, vice president analyst on Gartner's technology product manager team within the technology and service provider research unit. Mr. Gilley's research addresses product management in various technology domains, with a focus on digital product management and the principles of agile product development and design.
Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on emerging technologies at the Gartner Technology Growth and Innovation Conference, taking place March 20-21 in Grapevine, TX.
