Get Common understanding with Metaphors

Developing a strategy or plan for a product or business area can be a difficult task, especially when it comes to discussing time. It can be challenging to get everyone on board and open up to new ideas. However, working with metaphors can be an effective technique to engage and inspire creativity among all participants.

In this article, I will share my experience of using the metaphor of cars in a workshop with the management and product teams. The main objective was to get a clear understanding of the business goals so that the product team could focus on achieving the desired market position. Metaphors help us to define a strategy and create an objective roadmap.

Metaphor

During our workshop, I introduced a metaphor to help us conceptualize three different time horizons. The metaphor involved three types of cars: 

• Gasoline car - Represented the present

• Hybrid car - Represented near future

• Fully electric car - Represented the ultimate goal

We used these metaphors to guide our discussion on what we could expect to see on each horizon, what steps we could take to move toward our goal, and how we could make progress. The metaphor helped to make the discussion more concrete and accessible and allowed us to explore different perspectives and ideas on how to move forward.

After the workshop

Following the workshop, I took the time to gather all the valuable input we received and used it to create a comprehensive and actionable roadmap. In order to enhance the storytelling aspect of the project, we also developed a visually engaging canvas that featured a variety of images and photographs specifically chosen to evoke the appropriate emotions and sentiments associated with each particular state.

Objective Roadmap

Conclusions

Some of my takeaways from the work include the following

• Even though we had different backgrounds and roles it was easy to get started and find a common goal

• It was easy to understand the different states and relate to them. 

• We switched focus from talking about time and limitation and instead we started talking about the metaphors on our focus to reach our goals

• The feedback from the groups  I’ve worked with thought it was relaxed and not so much pressure on delivery

• Alignment between stakeholders was quite easy, instead of having discussions like "What do you think will happen in 2025” and "I think this will happen in 2026”

• Great visualisation

• A good way to visualize the wishes vs the team's capacity

Example canvas of the result for Mid state