MVP Storytelling Template

Your free MVP Story Telling Template and how to use

This article will walk you through a MVP Storytelling Template I used in a customer workshop last week. If you are a project manager, product owner or work in consulting you can use this template to define your next MVP.

The MVP Storytelling Template will help your team to answer those difficult questions that distinguish between ideas that are "Cool" and ideas that are "Cool and create business value".

Use the MVP Story Telling Template

to ensure your ideas are fantastic

&

Create Business Value

at the same time!

Workshop purpose

Companies, product owners and consultants are often asked to create new ideas for their clients and customers.

In many case this starts out with an ideation session where everything is possible and we are looking for blue sky ideas. But sooner or later you team will need to evaluate those ideas and ensure they are not only fantastic but they create business value for the organization.

Often after an ideation session we have 30-50-100 ideas and while this is fantastic the question is:

Which of those ideas shall

we work on next?

If you have to many ideas and are not sure which of those ideas are worth while investing use the MVP Storytelling Template for a sanity check before you ask management to invest in your idea.

If you have no ideas and are looking for potential MVP candidates use the template to first create the ideas and then select those ideas that are worth while investing.

Workshop overview

1. Define the workshop goal: for your product, company or stakeholders
2. Share your project vision: to guide participants what you are looking for
3. Saying hello: ask people a relevant question that is related to the workshop goal
4. New ideas: ask people for new ideas to support the product vision
5. Join a team: use this if you have more than 6 participants to form breakout groups
6. MVP Sanity Check: scrutinize each idea to prove it is worth while pursuing

Preparing and Moderating Step 1-3

Go to Billboard Design Thinking LinkedIn Group and download the the PowerPoint template. Modify the visuals and add a workshop goal that fits to your project. Then either print out the poster for a in-person workshop or create a virtual version in Klaxoon.

Start the workshop with introducing the workshop topic, why participants are invited and that you are expecting to leave the room with defined MVPs that can be put into the product backlog for considering investment.

Share the project vision with the participants to guide them what you are trying to achieve. For example, you might want to explore how to use Microsoft Powerplatform in your company.

For the "Saying Hello" exercise think of a question that's related to the workshop goal. For example, if you are working on an omni-channel marketing experience then ask a simple question like: "Share the most annoying marketing experience". The purpose of this exercise is to get people talking about the topic from a personal perspective so they can share some insights and everybody is thinking about the workshop topic.

Moderating Step - 3

After everybody shared his/her thoughts about the topic and has introduced him/her self ask people to go whiled and think about ideas related to the workshop topic. It's important to emphasize that there are no constraints today. Neither budget, technology nor organizational constraints. Today everything is possible!

1. Everything is possible: no matter how crazy your ideas is Microsoft can do it!
2. No budget constraints: if it costs $ 100 Mio who cares if your return $ 300 Mio!
3. Today is Christmas: imagine you had a magic wand what would you do with it?

Give participants 5-7 minutes and ask them to work "Alone" and write down as many ideas as they can come up with.

Ensure participants are working alone and are not talking!

--------

The rooms should be quiet so people can concentrate!

Make it clear to everybody, that you are expecting minimum 2-3 ideas from everybody. Afterall today is Christmas, there are no budget and no technology constraints so surely there is something every individual in the room would want to have. There are no stupid ideas and the more crazy the idea is the better it is for everybody.

Sharing ideas in Step - 3

Now comes the sharing part where each participant comes to the Billboard Poster and shares their ideas. Engage the participants into a discussion and ask them why the idea is fantastic and let them elaborate on their idea. Then ask them to put it on the board and explain why they selected the place according to the two categories on the X/Y axis.

1. Increase in employee / customer satisfaction
2. Business values and ROI

The idea behind the exercise is to force participants to think about how the idea will create business value and customer/employee satisfaction at the same time. This will let them start thinking about their ideas from a business decision makers perspective. If an idea has no business value and/or is not improving end-user satisfaction it is certainly not worth investing in.

Moderator tip: ensure everybody is listening and support the person presenting the idea to make their voice heard. If participants are having side discussion ask them politely to please listen to the person sharing his/her idea.

Don't forget breaks!

It's probably a good idea to have a break either after step 3 or 4 because the introduction and sharing ideas will most probably take 60 - 90 minutes.

Forming teams for breakout sessions in Step - 4

Next ask participants to write their name on a post-it and decide in which team they want to work and also ask them to pick one idea they are interested in working on.

In this workshop each participant takes one idea and is promoted as product owner and will be responsible for proving it's value.

The idea here is that each participant take ownership of one idea and finds a team he/she wants to work in. This ensures everybody will take center stage during the workshop and we will have different people pitching their ideas and leading the discussion.

Working on the MVP as a team to add details

To start the exercise each participant take the idea they want to work on and puts in the top left box under "REFINE YOUR IDEA". Once the ideas are distribute under "YOUR IDEA #01, #02,..." ask who has selected idea #01 and ask this person to come to the poster and moderate his/her idea.

Make it clear to the group that everybody should help the participant make their idea come true and they should support.

The nice thing about this workshop is that every participant is fully involved and take the role of a product owner and subject matter expert to explain the idea to the group and then ask the group to help him/her to add details.

Deep-dive on shaping the MVP Ideas

Note: the individual questions will probably need to be adopted to the project you are working on. This template was generated for exploring how a company can benefit from Microsoft PowerApps and in this context it is mostly about productivity gains and the question number six aims to highlight what employees will do with the freed up time. Questions seven then asks about employee satisfaction that will come with implementing PowerApps for employees.

The product owner of the idea and the team need to answer the following questions:

1. Refine your idea: add context and additional details to frame the idea. This is done by the person who selected the idea and can explain why he/she thinks the idea is valuable.
2. Who are the users: elaborate who the users are and there might be primary, secondary users involved. For example, the primary user might be the call center employee and the secondary user might be your customer.
3. How many users: make a guess if you have 10-50-100.....10.000 or a million users. In order to justify the investment and calculate the benefit we need to understand how many users will benefit from the application.
4. What is improved: be explicit what problems you are solving for end-users / business. If you don't know what problem you are solving you can't calculate the value and won't get any investment.
5. Time saving/business: explain how the improvement creates time saving/business value. In general those are simple calculations for example; we have 800 employees in our service department. Each of them completes 5-8 service request each day. For each service request we are wasting 5 minutes with administrative work. Now make a simple calculation ([200 Employees] x [6 Requests/Day] x [5 min] x [250days/year) equals 25.000 work hours per year. I guess you have a nice business case that justifies investment.
6. What will you do with the time saved: in most cases applications are about efficiency gain and then the question is: "If you save time with doing..... what will you do with the free time you gained"? In many case we see employees expanding work time into their private live and a simple answer could be "Get your time done during your working hours and improve the employees work/live balance".
7. How will this improve employee satisfaction: This can be simple answers like: use time for more qualitative work, remove administrative work that frustrates employees, improve work live balance, free up time for creativity etc...
8. How will this create value for customers: We want to ensure that the solutions create will help the company achieve their mission and vision and every organization has customer. If the idea does not help the business create customer value and help sell service and products your idea wont be worth anything.

Time for pitching back the solutions (max 90sec)

The workshop closes with each product owner pitch back the solution for the idea they selected in step four. The product owner will pitch the idea to the entire group.

Important: each pitch is

limited to 90 second

We had much fun closing the session with each participant pitching their idea but I was also very strict cutting the word after 90 seconds. With 15 ideas it took us ~ 22 minutes to share the highlights of each idea. If you give participants 5-10 ideas this will be a grueling 60-90 minutes sharing session and instead of having participants exited they will be overburdened with information, excausted and happy the workshop has finally ended.

make the pitching session a short fun exercise to end the workshop on high-note with joy and laughter

While it feels strange for the first 1-2 participants that they are cut off after 90 seconds it ensures everybody understands we want a short succinct summary and won't spend 5-10 minutes for each idea. The purpose of the sharing session is not to elaborate about each individual detail but to give the group an overview of the fantastic work they did in the session.

Closing remarks and encouragement for product owners who want to give it a try.

This workshop example is derived from a workshop conducted last week in Brussels for Microsoft and we where looking for ideas how the company could benefit from #Microsoftpowerapps platform.

Our customer thought the workshop was engaging and due to COVID we had a hybrid setup duplicating the template in #Klaxoon and having two break out sessions in the room and one breakout session online and sharing all ideas in a final pitch session.

Even if you never moderated a Design Thinking workshop give it a try to find the next MVP or product you want to bring to market.

You can downloaded the template if you join Billboard Design Thinking LinkedIn Group and use it to find your next MVP you want to implement.

Thanks to (99+) Adrien de Longvilliers | LinkedIn and (99+) Jean-Fran?ois Denis | LinkedIn who helped me create this templated and shared their consulting knowhow and input when designing the workshop.

Happy Design Thinking