Using Stories to explain your Marketing Efforts

In Scrum, work is expressed in the backlog as user stories. A team may write its user stories in a number of ways as long as they are written from the perspective of the end user. Put another way, team members are encouraged to think of their work from the perspective of who will use it, hence “user” story.

In the Scrum Methodology blog they stated:

Many Scrum teams have adopted the user story template developed by Mike Cohn, which identifies who the end user is, what the end user wants, and why in a single sentence. This model of the user story is most often written like this: “As a [end user role], I want [the desire] so that [the rationale].

They also defined it further in a contest that they had by asking for these requirements:

• The Problem. What was going wrong at your organization that made you decide to implement agile or Scrum?
• The Application. Once your organization decided to use Scrum to surface dysfunction and transform its processes, how did you go about doing it? What were the first steps you took? Was it an organization-wide adoption or just on the team level? Did you use training or tools?
• The Solution. What was the result? Can you quantify the improvements that Scrum and agile helped realize? Have other teams at your organization begun adopting agile management techniques?

Stories are used because they make it easier to understand,  remember and use. The limitation is that you do not know if you have been given all the facts.  A short clip from a training class Paul of ThinkSticky teaches on the content of the book, Made to Stick. This hands-on training illustrates how those qualities can be leveraged in your daily work.

I have started to use stories in explaining the outcome that is desired in a marketing campaign or event. I  plan on further developing this topic in a series of blog post. This is the first blog in this series.

Related posts:

Agile Marketing – Maybe?

Start your Marketing with a User Story

Further reading:

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

 User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

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