User Stories
Adventures in storytelling
Upstream: Context & Background
I consider myself a serious person with an absurd sense of humor. My biography involved a lot of context-switching, culture shock, and (on-going) development of identity and communication skills. I spent formative years as a kid and young adult in the vast region of America between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains, downloading Napster, living in a drinking town with a football problem, having my name and physical features on 9/11, and filing my first Form 1040 in the moral center of the country, Chicago, the City of Big Shoulders. I briefly left the country, learned to further empathize with the immigrant experience, and then returned to negotiate the Big Apple as a new parent.
I’ve had a wide-ranging career from non-profit organizing to Fortune 100 environments all over the Americas. I’ve helped build and lead teams to create innovative solutions, leading strategy, implementation, people development, data ownership, and stakeholder management.
I’ve exercised many multidisciplinary muscles of a product person, resulting in a T-shaped corporate athlete who is a “jack of all trades and master of [n]one.”
Decades ago, before companies began openly acknowledging how heavily they relied on software, I think a brand manager filled this organizational and leadership role. Now, digital screens are ubiquitous and the user/customer experience is disintermediated by a technology product.
In my experience, the “product” tribe itself is large, diverse, and exists at all levels and in all types of organizations: it is the thinking and feeling nervous system connecting various functional areas of a company, including upstream suppliers, vendors, and partners.
Many companies, especially ones operating in highly regulated sectors such as financial services, oil & gas, biopharmaceuticals, and utilities develop command-and-control hierarchies. They develop an operating model and culture which optimizes to maintain adherence to internal or public policy. The objective is to prevent downside risks from manifesting themselves. For those industries, the severity and duration of environmental and societal impacts require strong governance.
In those sectors, the functional role of a "business analyst" may get allocated to the company’s Information Technology department. The department itself may be treated as a cost center, rather than a source of innovative thought. Combining old, discarded ideas to learn from is frowned upon, disruption is dangerous, change is unwelcome, and cynicism can be rampant.
However, like people, organizations exist on a spectrum. Many have accepted that information, access, and capabilities have been “democratized” via the screen.
Tactically, in more agile organizations, a product person may be accountable for prioritizing and documenting requirements. Pragmatically, a user story is documentation of an on-going conversation. Key takeaways, insights, and decisions are housed in a user story and its project requirements.
Over the years, I developed a skill set of identifying a market, user, or customer need. Through creative storytelling, my superpower is effectively articulating a dynamic in order to focus the energy and efforts of multiple stakeholders to operate as a team and build a solution which also makes business sense. Having recruited and developed strong talent, my view is product people over-index in conscientiousness, communication, and influence to accomplish some specific objective or outcome which generates free cash flow. My specialty is in convincing partners who may have backed themselves up an ideological hill to come down and join the mission.
In practice, the process is usually a series of conversations with a disparate group of stakeholders, each with their own tribal affinity, culture, agenda, and incentives, to achieve alignment of vision, priorities, and action plan.
This is an intentional effort to document anecdotes and opinions as a collection of on-going stories. In my humble opinion, “product” consists of any leader trying to make sense of people, systems, incentives, infrastructure, events, needs, wants and demands. An individual who has market insight, who has established credibility, and earns authority is a de-facto product leader in any organization.
I wanted to roll up my sleeves, and publish user stories with a collection of some of my own thoughts and observations. My objective is to generate feedback and commentary to help myself and the audience in sense-making and understanding the ecosystems in which we operate as humans: constituents, users, and talent.
I’m not a fan of thought-terminating clichés, however market conditions, changing expectations of human behavior, including hopes, fears, and ambition of individuals mean the only constant is variance.
Darwin observed that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations which increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Contrary to the image portrayed in a typical organization chart, teams and companies are not static. At least, not for very long. As homo sapiens, our ability to cooperate and communicate at scale distinguished us from the other hairless apes.
In my modus operandi as a servant-leader, if you’re never failing, you may not be learning, if you’re not learning, you’re not growing, and if you’re not growing in your understanding, as a person, a team, or an organization, then don’t be surprised by what happens next.
What happens next is organic (or inorganic) activity, which can result in learning or trauma. Trauma plus time equals comedy.
I hope you find these takes original, interesting, and useful.
Downstream: Language + Norms + Art*Technology = Generational Cohort