At the January meeting, we had the pleasure of hosting Ron Gagnier, a champion of customer experience, product design and design thinking.

Ron introduced us to the concept of storytelling as a simple yet effective technique to validate our assumptions about the problem we’re trying to solve and potential solutions, before we start formulating requirements in any format. 

Stories are central to the human experience and convey what data cannot: meaning, emotion, and context. And so we can use stories to tease out details from our stakeholders that we may not otherwise get.

Write a quick paragraph to describe a problem scenario to validate your assumptions and generate a discussion to get even more details about the current user experience. Then present a story describing a potential solution to gauge a reaction to your ideas. Enrich your stories with simple imagery in the form of a storyboard, and you have a powerful yet very inexpensive tool to validate your assumption or make changes without incurring any costs.

From here, you are ready to document your requirements in whatever format you prefer!

The speaker presentation will not be made available, but if you’re looking for the chapter updates, please refer to Event Presentations.