Story telling from A to Z, for product people

What the TopSol Playbook is:

• Technique to tell stories easily, using common good practices
• It is a basic recipe, easy to read, difficult to master
• Fit for a product/feature development
• From early stage to delivery: empathy, problem discovery, ideation, specs, development, test, deployment, sales
• Keep everyone in sync and aligned across different teams (remove some of the natural friction)
• People will understand the "why"
• Inspired by Lean Canvas and Monomyth
• Roots in Agile, Lean Startup, Design Thinking
• Very simple, and limited by design, using the systemic approach

• Tell a story, using the base ingredients.
• If you want/need to detail, use the options.
• Try, learn, get feedback, remix, change, and adapt to your audience, always & continuously!
• If you reduce your story to the bare minimum, just a few words, you might land on your Unique Value Proposition (UVP).
• If you want to seriously learn strong story telling techniques, read the right litterature.

"TopSol Playbook" is a set of recipes, templates and good practices, to help you shape your story telling. It is a guidance aimed at product people, like product owners, scrum masters, agile coaches, marketing people, sales people, even founders and C-levels CxO.

The "TopSol Playbook" may help you tell stories, but also may help you shape your {unique|key} value proposition.

It can be used to:

• describe a User Story or Epic, within an Agile team, using Scrum or Kanban, allows to project and better picture the expected outcome
• in a customer interview, test a solution, or a {unique|key} value proposition, validate or invalidate, persist or pivot, useful for Lean Startup and Design Thinking approaches
• sell a solution, product, or feature

TopSol Playbook helps you synchronise and align all the people involed in the User Story factory/pipeline.

• Playbook, because I didn't want another "framework" ;-) and to underline it is not an advanced story telling technique
• TopSol, because To-P-Sol:
  • To: Target, the people and personas you are targetting with your product or service
  • P: Problem, the problem they face and suffer from, that is worth fixing
  • Sol: Solution, the solution that you bring to your targets

Standing on shoulders of giants who stand on shoulders of giants, "TopSol Playbook" has its roots in:

• the Lean Canvas approach by Ash Maurya, I highly recommend this free online course: https://www.udemy.com/lean-canvas-course/ by Ash Maurya.
• Monomyth or "Hero's journey": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey
• "Why How What" by Simon Sinek: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

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The TopSol Playbook is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

You are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.