Many managers ask their teams to “wrap a story” around their demos – and many teams struggle to find and use stories that meet this requirement. One tactic is to use a “day-in-the-life” as the story to bind together a range of tasks, functions and, potentially, multiple job titles.
The end result is not really a story, but is simply an organizational framework – and as such it fails to engage interest. How could it? How exciting is it, after all, to hear about executing one’s day-to-day job?
It may be, in fact, unlikely that a real story can be wrapped around most demos (there may be no “Grand Unified Story Theory”…!). Stories are often most effective to serve as punctuation, as reinforcement, and as alternative mechanisms for making ideas stick.
[More on Storytelling for Demos shortly…]