Narrative aligned growth

Narratives have a way of dictating the growth of the product. I have been thinking about narratives for atleast the past decade.

In early 2016s, I was attending the first ever blockchain conference in India. Prior to that, around 2014 was when I printed the Bitcoin’s Whitepaper and marked it up to understand what the heck is it. I have been once a Bitcoin believer and continue to see its essence but opted out of the narrative and didn’t hitch my work in repurposing blockchain(underlying technology ) for the field of logistics, which was my focus back then.

In the book “Narrative economics” by Robert Shiller, he writes the following few lines to distill what the universal utility of narratives.

Anthropologists, who research the behavior of diverse cultures around the world, have observed a class of behaviors that they call “universals,” found in every human society if not in every individual. Anthropologist Donald E. Brown identified a universal that is important to this book: that people “use narrative to explain how things came to be and to tell stories.”

So, it’s only reasonable that I try to leverage this narrative vehicle to propagate the change needed in legacy domains like logistics and agriculture.

I have had multiple attempts at it with Subjimandi.app.

The uncertainty around the graded marketplace was put to rest with the adoption of www.subjimandi.app in retailers and repeat farmers who were patient to receive our services when we were stretched too thin.

I realised it little late to leverage it fully back then.

Closer to current work, narratives expressed as opinions of a theory become the default way to address challenges in legacy domains.

There are no problem to solve in legacy domains, only challenges that can be improved. Communicating why focusing on some challenges is important for a customer and we do it using narratives.

The loop of product awesomeness as framed by Jonny starts with the narrative. It impacts every aspect of product building.

The Product Narrative is the first and most important artefact for driving team toward outcomes that matter.

…

A Product Narrative helps collaboration by describing the desired outcome, how it solves customer problems, and why that matters. The narrative aligns the work with company goals, making it easily understandable for everyone involved.”

Curating this product narrative helps develop the roadmap among endless possibilities. It contextualises the role of product to the internal stakeholders and converts them into championing the eventual products outcome to our customers.

Tying this to demand. When customers find themselves in a situation of evaluating the product, it becomes a “not-not”— default choice.

As a product manager, building narratives becomes the highest order bit when growth is elusive. The reset happens with aligning the customer strategy to the product narrative.

Round up

Reductionist version of building Value in legacy domains

My colleague shared a competitors post on social media highlighting the importance of platform in value creation which led me to respond with this post.

Expertise in spot freight

This is my version of building narrative around the problem space I operate in the day job.

Links that resonated

Some wonderful posts have been written in the recent past. I would link to few more than usual this time, I hope you enjoy.

How startups loose their edge is from a member of Posthog distilling when startups drop the ball.

Traffic Dropped, Data Dried up: How This Media Company Pivoted is about Farm Journal’s pivot to become an intelligence company by building its brand through social media.

Frank Chimero is a designer who writes eloquently. He recently gave a talk Beyond machines which is wonderful in itself. He also wrote an extra post of all things he had to drop from the talk. Its around AI but it is so much more than that.

Sign off

November was a whirlwind of a month. I did travel for a week in the middle but the entire month went by before I could get any writing done.

I got to attend a trade conference for the first time in US. It was a fun experience. I happened to meet many senior folks from my organisation and one of them asked me the question, “What will make the product grow exponentially? “

The question lived rent free in my mind for an entire month until I got to write this issue. The narrative engine at play needs to be unpacked and put into motion at my day job for us to see the exponential growth.

Signing off till next time,

Vivek, learning the art of layers when stepping out in winter.