Try Out Beet, Because it'll Make You Red Pee

The Red Pee Proposition

Most parents have had the challenge of convincing their kids to eat vegetables.

"Try some brocolie, honey. It's good for you." 

"Why?'" 

"Because it's healthy. It gives you lots of vitamins and fiber." 

" No, thanks." (Looking away)  

This conversation I had with my kindergartener yesterday wasn't so typical.

"What is this red food?"

" It's called beet and it makes you red pee tomorrow if you eat enough."

"How many is enough?" 

"20 little pieces, I guess." 

"One, two, three... I got twenty!" (Chewing) 

Get Inside of Your Audience's Mind

Much of a Product Manager’s responsibility is to juggle multiple streams of conversation and move them towards closure. As a PM, you're required to influence and sell on a daily basis, to different audiences. During a good portion of your day, you make data-driven decisions (hopefully) with your left brain. Is it good to extend that capacity and sell with evidence or on the technicality side of the story? 

It depends. 

To an engineering audience, it may very well be the best way to go about it.  At the meantime, you'd better be prepared to sharpen up your right brain in order to take on an audience made up of sales, design or anyone new to the technology or concept you introduce on. 

How to Talk Tech to Non-Technical Audience

Live like an adult and think like a child - If you want to convince a child, you first learn how a child thinks.

The focus of the left brain is verbal, processing information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole. The right brain of the brain focuses on the visual, and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture then the details. Left brain thinking is verbal and analytical. The right brain is non-verbal and intuitive, using pictures rather than words. 

Left brained organization such as Amazon invented non-powerpoint presentation and evangelizes the beauty of 6 pagers. If you want to work at Amazon, be sure to brush up on AB testing, market sizing questions and learn how to write hypothetical product's press release and FAQ announcement. Amazon uses this "working backwards" approach because it forces the team to get the most difficult discussions out of the way early. They need to fully understand what the product's value proposition will be and how it will be pitched to customers. If the team can't come up with a compelling press release, the product probably isn't worth making. 

Case Study: Tell a Technical Story in the Language of your Audience

R2D3 is an experiment in expressing statistical thinking with interactive design. Using a data set about homes, they created a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco. This is the most powerful visual storytelling I've come across recently. How elegant!

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Immerse yourself in the data story

This is part 2 of story telling series. Find part 1 there.

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