Lean Storytelling
Lean storytelling: pitch and share your business idea in one minute
What Lean Storytelling is:
- Technique to tell stories easily, using common good practices, to be understood by your audience
More:
- It is a basic set of recipes to help shape a story
- It is quite easy to read and understand, but difficult to master
- Fit for a products and features development, not to be a succesful Hollywood screenwriter or awarded novelist
- Usable from early stage to delivery: empathy, problem discovery, ideation, specs, development, test, deployment, communication, sales, advertising, explainer videos, documentation
- Keep everyone in sync and aligned across different teams, remove some of the natural friction
- People will understand the "why", the goal, the guiding light
- Inspired by Lean Canvas, Monomyth, and The Golden Circle
- Roots in Agile, Lean Startup, Design Thinking, UX research
- Very simple and humble, voluntarily limited by design, using the systemic approach
Overview of the playbook
- Tell a story, using the base ingredients.
- If you want/need to detail, use the options.
- Try, learn, get feedback, remix, change, and adapt to your audience, always & continuously!
- If you reduce your story to the bare minimum, just a few words, you might land on your Unique Value Proposition (UVP).
- If you want to seriously learn strong story telling techniques, read the right litterature.
- This story telling technique differentiates: it is lean and agile, not generic, more dedicated to businesses
Basic story
- Target
- Problem
- Solution
Detailed story
- Target
- Empathy
- Problem
- Consequences
- Solution
- Benefits
Full story
- Context
- Target
- Empathy
- Problem
- Consequences
- Solution
- Benefits
- Why
Extension pack
Add any item, wherever you feel:
- Alternatives
- Competition
- Unfair advantage
- Challenge, question mark
- Self-benefits
- Stages in AARRR
- Warnings
- Quote
Summary
Core items | Detail items | Complete story |
---|---|---|
Context: where and when, the surroundings of the hero | ||
Target, the hero, who it is about | ||
Empathy, what the hero sees and feels | ||
Problem the hero faces, that slows down (NOT the absence of YOUR solution) | ||
Consequences of the problem | ||
Solution, what you offer, and how | ||
Benefits, the advantages your solution delivers | ||
Why, he guiding light, your internal compass |
Q&A, FAQ
What is Lean Storytelling ("TopSol Playbook")?
Lean Storytelling ("TopSol Playbook") is a set of recipes, templates and good practices, to help you shape your story telling. It is a guidance aimed at business-oriented people, like product owners/managers, scrum masters, agile coaches, marketing people, sales people, founders and C-levels CxO.
Story telling, you say? What else?
Lean Storytelling ("TopSol Playbook") may help you tell stories, but also may help you shape your {unique|key} value proposition.
How is it used? From A to Z?
It can be used to:
- describe a User Story or Epic, within an Agile team, using Scrum or Kanban, allows to project and better picture the expected outcome
- in a customer interview, test a solution, or a {unique|key} value proposition, validate or invalidate, persist or pivot, useful for Lean Startup and Design Thinking approaches
- sell a solution, product, or feature
Lean Storytelling helps you synchronise and align all the people involed in the User Story factory/pipeline.
What does "TopSol Playbook" stand for?
- Playbook, because I didn't want another "framework" ;-) and to underline it is not an advanced story telling technique
- TopSol, because To-P-Sol:
- To: Target, the people and personas you are targetting with your product or service
- P: Problem, the problem they face and suffer from, that is worth fixing
- Sol: Solution, the solution that you bring to your targets
Where does it come from?
Standing on shoulders of giants who stand on shoulders of giants, Lean Storytelling has its roots in:
- the Lean Canvas approach by Ash Maurya, I highly recommend this free online course: https://www.udemy.com/lean-canvas-course/ by Ash Maurya.
- Monomyth or "Hero's journey": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey
- "Why How What" by Simon Sinek: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action
What can I do to help?
- Star this repository
- Share this in your networks
- Ask questions in the issues
- Suggest modifications
- Submit a patch or a merge request
- Share your knowledge and experience
Can I use, share, and modify Lean Storytelling?
Lean Storytelling is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
Can you organise a workshop?
Yes, for 10 persons max, ping me on: