Find the story of your product
A memorable product story is invaluable for a startup. It helps your team unite around a common vision and it works miracles when communicating with customers or investors.
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” — Steve Jobs
But what if you don’t have a good story to tell about your product? Maybe you are just getting started, or the thing you are building is so new that it is hard to explain. As freelance designers, we meet many teams who work on incredible products, but who still struggle to tell their stories. Here is how we help them search for metaphors and analogies that can become the foundation of their communication.
Metaphors
A metaphor is a figure of speech that links two non-similar things, packing a lot of information into very few words. All languages are full of metaphors, such as bottleneck and couch potato. In fact, many product categories are such well-established metaphors that we hardly notice them, such as firewalls or antivirus software.
Whenever we meet a team that is working on something novel, we start looking for metaphors that can explain the product with a minimal number of words. Is there some colourful noun, verb or adjective the product team can use to make a complicated explanation more approachable?
Once, we met a startup called MarmeladMakeriet (Swedish for “Marmelade Makery”). They used fruit that was too old to be sold in supermarkets to make marmelade and juice. This was in 2014, and there wasn’t any established way (as far as we knew) to talk about this ingredient category — food that was about to be wasted even though it was still edible and tasty.
We realised that MarmeladMakeriet could use the word “rescued” to efficiently describe the act of turning potentially wasted fruit into a resource. It was a short, playful metaphor that hinted at some type of agency, as if a fruit had a will of its own and wanted to be put to good use. MarmeladMakeriet liked the simplicity of “rescued fruit” and instantly started using it as their slogan. A year later, they decided to use it as their name.
Analogies
Metaphors can generate interesting visual images; however, they are often so efficient that they grow invisible over time. If you want to use a slightly more informative or intriguing description of your product, you can look for an analogy instead.
Analogies often follow a “X is like Y” format, which emphasises that you’re comparing two things. They also typically require more effort to be understood than metaphors. Many startups use them to compare themselves to others when pitching to investors (“We are like AirBnB for offices”).
When used well, analogies can work like a riddle that sparks your audience’s curiosity. On the other hand, they can also be quite vague and muddle your product message, so be careful not to confuse your listeners.
In 2018, we met two visionary founders who wanted to make it possible to create NFTs from any web page. We started playing around with analogies and found that these NFTs could be likened to statues or monuments that people create to remember interesting web pages they had visited. This idea of “marble statues, but for web pages” eventually inspired a generative art pattern that became the significant design element of Marble Card NFTs.
Lateral thinking
Looking for an engaging product story involves a heavy dose of lateral thinking. This means that you think “sideways” to approach a challenge from many different angles instead of trying to solve it head-on through step-by-step reasoning. An answer to a lateral thinking question might seem obvious in hindsight, even if it’s just one of many possible solutions.
When there is no obvious place to begin, we often find it useful to start looking for story fragments that might already exist among people involved with a new product. Maybe a team member, early customer or investor has found a way to talk about the product that you can refine or expand upon?
Whenever we find a story seed, we try to look at it from many angles to explore if it can grow into something that bears fruit. This was the case when we worked on a website update for Debricked, a startup that creates solutions for developers that use open source. Early on, the team told us that they view open source as a journey. But what did this journey metaphor mean? How could it be made more concrete and relatable?
Together with Debricked, we started exploring several versions of journey-related stories. Could a journey through open source be told with elements from old-fashioned adventures, or should we try fantasy or sci-fi? Whenever we found a promising angle, we visualised different versions of it until we could determine if it was a dead end or a pathway forward.
Finally, we arrived at a space travel theme that became the new backbone of Debricked’s story and website. This analogy built on the classic tropes of space operas, where heroes upgrade or repair the spaceships that they trust with their lives.
Stories for everyone
Why is product storytelling difficult? Could it be that many businesspeople lack the skill of telling stories? We don’t think so. In our experience, the main challenge is the first step: to come up with a satisfying story to tell at all. A useful product story must be engaging and memorable for a wider audience outside of your own group. It should be so simple and catchy that it can be retold by anyone and spread easily.
We hope that these approaches will help you find a compelling story about your product. Look for metaphors or analogies that resonate with your team and your customers. Then iterate on your story seed and refine it based on your audience’s feedback. When you eventually find something that works, a lot of pieces will start falling into place for your team.
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