Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge  After an organization change, the email product is transferred to our team without the headcount. I  was assigned as the product manager of the product. We had to get a good grip on the product and  the market. We had a lot to do in a short period in order to meet our goals.

Being a fairly old technology, email market is a well saturated one. Our competitors are long time  players with well-established products. On the other hand, besides having several complaints about  some features and general clumsiness of their current email services, potential customers have a  comfort zone in using our competitors’ products.

Our goal was meeting our penetration and sales goals under these circumstances.

Selection  I selected storytelling for this challenge. As stakeholders tend to feel unsafe about meeting their  goals under these difficult conditions, I believed utilizing a method different from the ordinary goal  setting ways would be what the team needs in order to perform up to their potential.  Communication around a story rather than analyses and numbers would arose emotional connection  among the team. This would help them to get rid of the stress and engage to a larger purpose.

Application  First thing we did was to gather around the idea of being a part of the team which launches Turkey’s  first enterprise scale individual and corporate email platform. And how it would contribute to the  national data security. It was all about being independent technologically. This would make the  whole team feel to have a purpose, larger than just meeting some financial goals.

Being in a financially disadvantageous national economy, especially about currencies, serving a  product with local currency provides the upper hand to the corporations as predictable costs. With a  broader view, it will help raising the savings and financial development in national scale. Our team  was composed of all local professionals that is why being a part of national benefit makes a perfect  sense in making emotional connections.

We prepared a quick survey, sent to our early adapters and collected their responses. The responses  of real people who experience our product, the product we built with extra care and a lot of hard  work. We combined the responses and composed a story in which real people tell us how we help  them in their businesses. At this point, it was obvious that for the team being in this project and  putting all the effort was not about solving some technical, financial or marketing problems. It was all  about partnering people in their business and making it easier to succeed instead. It was not about  solving problems one after another, now they feel they have a cause. A cause in which they solve a  number of problems on the way without noticing.

All in all, with the design thinking approach the project was a success which may easily be otherwise  should we decide to focus on problems and goals traditionally.

Insight  I think it all comes down to the motivation that pulls people to their duties instead of the duties  themselves. Most of the time, people get bogged into the daily deeds and the turmoil around them.  We all tend to disregard or even forgot why we do what we do. Or what values we contribute to the  masses of people. Design thinking breaks this loop and make us remember and be mindful about our

larger purpose. I believe that was what makes the difference on our project and one of the biggest  pillars behind our success.

Approach  Storytelling has become a valuable asset in my arsenal. I believe if I support storytelling with other  design thinking tools such as, visualization, mind mapping and learning launch we would benefit from  a broader perspective of design thinking on other projects, specifically where the definition of the  problem is ambiguous, there are a lot of data but it is difficult to tell which are relevant and it is hard  to predict cause and effect.

