Module 1
Page 3 of 13

Setting out your product story

What is a product story?

At the beginning of a new project, there are often lots of exciting ideas being formed and discussions going on about how a product or service could work. Before beginning to work on actual development, though, we find it useful to formalise these ideas into a product story.<

Why do this?

  • It makes the ideas concrete and shared
  • It exposes assumptions
  • It becomes an agreed narrative that you can refer back to throughout the process or use as the basis to discuss with others and get their feedback and input
  • It allows you to test ideas and find the language that makes most sense to you

We find the following format is useful to create a narrative around a product or service - the project story:

A. The world is a certain way:
Outline the current status quo

B. Something changes:
Outline the solution proposed

C. The world is now different:
Outline the changes this solution will bring

D. Why us?
Outline the reasons why your team is well placed to do this work

This example shows how we created a product story for mobile technology that can be used by patients to share information about their health between visits to their doctor.

A. The world is a certain way

1. Doctor / patient relations are strained:
  • Doctors may see patients infrequently and for just a short appointment
  • There’s pressure on doctors to see more patients so appointment times are squeezed
  • Time spent with patients is used to capture routine measurements rather than explore how patients feel or what they want
  • It’s difficult for doctors to get a true picture of a patient’s health, as they only have the patient’s memory to go on
2. Patients do not have the tools to engage in and personalise their own healthcare:
  • Not enough effort goes into setting patients health goals to manage their condition between medical visits
  • Self-reporting of health symptoms and outcomes is inaccurate
  • Tracking technologies are focused on medical research rather than health care
3. Involvement in clinical and medical research doesn’t engage participants or bring them direct value:
  • Clinical trials create evidence for average populations rather than for individuals
  • Clinical trials are not designed to give any value to those taking part in them
  • It’s difficult and expensive to recruit participants for medical research

B. Something changes

  1. ‘Value based pricing’ takes off - the price that hospitals pay for a treatment depends on a successful outcome for patients
  2. Access to smart mobile and wearable technology at scale
  3. Increasing acceptance of intuitive interfaces via app and cloud based computing
  4. Rising customer expectation of personalised healthcare

C. The world is now different

  1. Willingness of patients to track and share where there is value for them
  2. The need for healthcare systems to gather highly accurate outcome and health information from patients between appointments
  3. Blurring of the lines and incentive models between medical research and healthcare

D. Why us?

  1. Able to design and build intuitive experiences on mobile and wearable technology that engage patients
  2. Able to deploy at scale onto mobile and wearable technology across Android and iOS
  3. Technology and evidence base built using accredited ISO 13485 process
  4. Lessons learnt and case study from deploying in US Healthcare system
  5. Route to deployment and route to market from existing contacts

Working with diverse groups

The product story makes your concept concrete and lets you share it. This is particularly important when you’re working with a range of internal roles and external stakeholders.

Internal roles might include a product owner, project manager or Scrum master, developers, designers, researchers, content producers, content experts, medical professionals and more.

External stakeholders within a biomedical project might include funders, partner institutions, user groups (both clinicians and patients) and customers. Bringing all those people together requires a shared vision, which your project story can provide.

For all of these roles, we’ve found that projects work much better when we bring together diverse groups, in all senses of the words. A mix of people will make sure that your product development is informed by all potential stakeholder perspectives and that your own biases (which we all have, and are rarely conscious of) are challenged.

“Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.”

From “Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter”

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Case study

Bringing researchers, academics and charities together to design care interventions for people with dementia.

Challenge

Across the UK there are 850,000 people with dementia, a number expected to increase to over 1 million by 2025. People who live with dementia show remarkable resilience. Their daily lives are still filled with personal stories, relationships and meaning. But with an aging population and no known cure, dementia is a challenge not just for those who face it every day, but for the healthcare system as a whole.

To support scientific advances in dementia, the government launched a nationwide initiative “Challenge on dementia 2020”. Part of this initiative was a call for breakthrough research from ‘citizen scientists’ - and that’s where Ctrl Group came in. The Department of Health asked us to help define what citizen science could look like for dementia research.

Approach

  • We created a blueprint of a platform for citizen science in dementia and shared it with academic researchers across the UK. s This led us to propose a citizen science platform with a focus on research on dementia care in people’s homes.

  • With such a large number of stakeholders and ideas floating around, the project had its own steering committee. We led collaborative decision-making at each stage. The outcome was the concept for Dementia Citizens with a shortlist of academic partners.

  • The process was iterative, with successive phases of design each building on learnings from the previous round of research.

  • Each phase of research involved visiting people with dementia and carers at their homes, sharing working prototypes on iPhones and iPads, and understanding people’s experience of the apps in their everyday lives.

Results

  • Dementia Citizens is a platform that connects people affected by dementia with researchers. People with dementia and their carers could download an app.

  • Each app is a research study that tests a different hypothesis about dementia care. For example, the study app Playlist for Life tests the hypothesis that playing personally meaningful music improves wellbeing and quality of life for people with dementia and their carers. Each study app lets people with dementia and their carers try out an activity and track its impact on their lives.