The Flywheel / Research / 02 Stories

02Research · step 2 of 4

Stories

Find the real people driving each trend, and understand their world and their pain.

The Storyboard: cover

The tool for this step

The Storyboard

Find the humans behind the trend. Find the real people driving each trend, and understand their world and their pain before anything else.

How to use The Storyboard →
Download the StoryboardPDF · 3 pages: cover, board, how to use it

What it is

If a trend is real, humans are driving it. Stories finds those people, the real early adopters, and tells their story with them as the hero.

You are still listening. Nothing gets designed here and nothing is offered. First understand their world and their pain, right now; then let the story sketch where they want to go. The customer is the hero, not your product and not your platform.

How to run it

Step 1Find the humansThe real people behind each forming trend, as many as you can find, guided by the owner. Public posts, or people who agreed to talk.
Step 2Understand their world nowWhere they work and live, what a normal day looks like, and the tools and people around them.
Step 3Name their pain, three waysWhat is in the way, how it feels, and why it shouldn't be this way. Then what is at stake if nothing changes.
Step 4Sketch where they want to goWhat success looks like to them, and who they want to become: from → to, in their own words.

Every card grows as its trend moves on the Compass: forming, then clear, then confirmed or ruled out by the Simulator.

What you produce

The Storyboard: find the humans behind the trend. Find the real people driving each trend, and understand their world and their pain before anything else.

Examples

A

The teacher and the letter

One early adopter was a primary-school teacher who posted photos of the letters she wrote to her pupils' families. Her pain was not nostalgia; it was that nothing she sent home was ever kept. From: ignored notes in book bags. To: letters families pinned to the fridge.

Where it goes wrong

  • Personas instead of people“Aged 35–50” produces nothing. A hero is a real person with a world and a pain.
  • Skipping to solutionsThe moment someone says “we could”, the hero stops being the subject. Hold every idea about helping.
  • Inventing the voiceA voice you wrote yourself will only ever agree with you. Source every quote.
  • The convenient painA hero whose problem happens to fit what you already have is not a hero. It is a sales deck.

What it hands on

The Map watches the Storyboard: each hero's world, pain and from → to are where its journeys begin.