Challenge

Due to the COVID 19 global pandemic government had shutdown all offices, schools and  stores.  People were confined to their homes all vehicular traffic was banned and people could  only walk for essential supplies. Right in the middle of this, I moved to a new role in my  company that is a supplier of technology products.  And we needed to create a few new Go-To- Market (GTM) offers.  We didn’t want to do this in isolation but co-develop GTM along with a  few stakeholder from our customers. Under normal circumstances this would be done via  face-face interviews in the customer’s office.  But with everybody confined to work from  home, we had rely on doing these interviews over the phone. This was a tremendous challenge  given the overall stressful situation due to the pandemic.

Selection

When we started making these calls to stakeholders for their feedback, we sensed that  stakeholders were extremely distracted, could hear children and dogs barking in the  background or stakeholder put us an mute and went away to handle another task.  After the  1st few disastrous calls, we decided that we need to change the format.  We need to make  process more interesting for the stakeholders, so that stakeholders will make an extra effort  to find a quieter place in their house  with a better wifi signal. We chose the storytelling tool,   building a story for each of the different GTM that we were creating.

Application

We changed the process of the stakeholder interview call.  We took into consideration that the  wifi signal maybe poor, so we reduced the number of powerpoint slides to just 1-2 per GTM.   The key focus was to build an interesting story around each of the GTM that we were asking for  feedback.  To have an interesting storyline we built in key details such as …

• Which City and country did the this situation take place.   • The type of customer ( bank, supermarket or manufacturing)   • Challenge that this customer was facing   • Made personal by adding first name of the customer

We inserted the Technology product into the storyline, and highlighted how technology solved  some of the challenges the customer was having.

Insight

After we changed the format and used the storyline methodology to get feedback from our  stakeholders on the co-creation of GTM we observed

• Many of the calls started of with background noise and distractions, but once we

started the story the stakeholders were curious and didn’t want to miss out on the plot,  they asked us to hold and moved to quieter area

• There was much more engagement from the stakeholders, they asked about the

details and wanted to know more about the story and the actors in the story

• The calls lasted much longer, and stakeholders at times even cancelled or postponed

their next calls to stay on

• And it was not only about the stakeholders, but we as team felt more energy and

positive about the process

• We got pages of notes from each call as feedback, and several new ideas that we had

not thought about

Approach

We used the storyline methodology a little by accident and in an adhoc method.  After  reviewing the course material and listening to experts like Luis Rodriguez,  I understood why the  storyline tool worked for us.  In some of the past projects that I have worked on we focused on  the technology component and not enough on the Human Dimension as Guida  discusses.    In this hyper connected environment and virtual world it is becoming increasing  important to engage with stakeholders and get quality feedback during the co-creation  process.

