Avengers Assemble!
(Or how to design a multi-use case narrative)
Remember back in the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, long before it became the sprawling, complex mess it is now, when you had six different heroes? The OG Avengers. Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Thor, and Hawkeye.
The MCU became such a hit because the folks in charge were masters of narrative.
You see, what started off as five and a half origin stories (I still don’t know why Hawkeye didn’t get his own film) became something bigger than the sum of its parts.
And the way the brains at Marvel pulled that off actually gives a fantastic insight into how you can design a narrative when your product has multiple use cases.
Okay, I’m listening…
Enter Loki. Thor’s meddlesome trickster of a brother. Loki, under the guidance of Thanos, decides to invade New York with some kind of alien race I can’t be bothered to look up.
Us mere mortals have no chance against this level of enemy. They have like laser guns and shit. Our cute little guns are nothing to them.
And so Samuel L. Jackson, I mean Nick Fury, decides Earth’s only hope is to gather the six aforementioned heroes together, teaming them up to save the day.
Just like that, the Avengers are born. And just like that, the MCU is put on a collision course with its destiny of becoming a cultural touchstone.
From a narrative standpoint, what the Marvel team did here was they introduced various stories, each self-contained. And once people had identified with the various heroes, they laddered up all those stories into something bigger.
They introduced a bigger enemy.
And a bigger enemy needs a bigger narrative.
What’s this got to do with my product?
Yeah this is a fair question. I’m on the cusp of going down a Marvel rabbit hole if I’m not careful. So be sure to pull me out if I get too close.
What does all this Avengers crap have to do with SaaS?
Well, if you replace each of those superheroes with one of your product’s use cases, then you can maybe start to see where I’m going with this.
There are broadly two types of product. Let’s call them simple and complex.
Simple products are really fucking good at one thing. They’re used by one type of customer for one purpose. Like Hulk. His one job is to smash stuff. And he’s great at it.
Complex products are designed to provide value for different types of customer. Like a swiss army knife. And, well, like the Avengers.
Simple products are for a person. Complex products are for an organisation.
When it comes to designing a narrative for a simple product, your job is made slightly easier by the fact that there’s only one thread you need to follow.
But a complex product has multiple threads, multiple different narrative options, and so you need to find a way to weave them together. You need your avengers to assemble.
Riiiight, and how do I do that?
You have two choices here. A top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. Neither of these is better than the other, it really depends on your starting point.
If you’re clear on an overarching narrative but not sure where your use cases fit in, then you should go top-down. If you’ve nailed your use cases but can’t see how to join them together then go bottom-up.
Using the top-down approach
Okay so you already have an idea of your big narrative. In the MCU it was “how the fuck do we stop this god invading New York with his alien army”. For this to work, your overarching narrative needs to be at an organisational level.
In other words, the problem are you solving for the entire company. Crossing departments or teams. It’s something that needs to add high-level value.
On a recent project, it became pretty clear that my client had the makings of their overarching narrative. Their product helps to give everyone at an organisation the ability to easily collect and interpret market insights. You see how this impacts the whole company. It’s a narrative that works across departments.
But that alone wouldn’t be enough. Because you still need to get buy-in from each individual department. And an overarching narrative doesn’t actually achieve that.
And so we had to then take the three main departments that their product helped. We settled on Product, Sales, and Success. At that point we could ask a simple question to unlock the sub-narratives:
“Why would being able to collect market insights someone on this team?”
A more general way of framing this would be:
“How does our overarching narrative add value to this specific individual?”
Once you can answer that for each of your chosen use cases, then you have the connection between your narrative and each sub-narrative.
Using the bottom-up approach
So what if it’s the other way round? What if you have a few really tight use cases but there’s no real thread between them?
Well, this is where you can take a leaf out of the MCU playbook.
How? By introducing a bigger (and shared) enemy.
You do this by distilling each use case down into a core problem. If we reversed my client’s example above, you’d have the following use cases:
Product teams struggle to know what to build to keep ahead of market trends
Sales teams struggle to prepare properly for calls and demos
Success teams struggle to identify opportunities for retention and upselling
Now at first glance these feel unrelated. But if you turn each into a problem, you have:
Product teams don’t have the info they need
Sales teams don’t have the info they need
Success teams don’t have the info they need
Huh. Turns out these use cases have more in common than it first appeared. Each of these teams is actually fighting the same bigger enemy: a lack of information.
Now that we know that, we can craft an overarching narrative that fights the big bad and brings together all the different subnarrative threads.
The makings of a marvel-ous narrative
As you can see, even a complex product with multiple use cases can be turned into a simpler narrative that sits at the heart of your messaging.
In fact, I’d say it’s an imperative. The last thing you need is someone visiting your site and thinking, “Woah this is way too much to look at”.
By treating each use case as its own subnarrative and then laddering up to a bigger narrative, you’re able to tie those threads together and make sense of it all.
And then you can defeat the pesky Loki and save the earth. Or something like that.
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