The Venture Story Workbook

Absolutely not. This structure can work for any project (external or internal), solution (product, experience, or internal process), tax status (for-profit or non-profit), or stage (start-up or institution). Everything you build has a real, human end user. They might be an external customer. They might be an internal colleague. But each one has a pain point, a solution, and a user journey to go on. Tell that user story in Act I. Adjust your emphasis in Act II and Act III depending on your circumstances and goals.

Absolutely not. You should think of this framework as a starting point for the development of your story, not the ending point. My goal is to do the heavy lifting for you up front to 1) make sure that all your critical venture design bases are covered and 2) help you see how they can fit together into a story. (It's not easy!) Once you do that, I expect you to iterate on the structure. Your pitch should feel unique and distinctive. Make it your own.

No. I do not expect your final pitch will include every single beat. You should adjust your pitch and the points you emphasize based on what you know about your audience. (The Design Review process is intended to help you do this iteration.) So some of these beats will be cut entirely and some will be expanded. However, I do think you do need to make a 54-beat version of your pitch for one particular audience member - yourself. Whether you include these slides in a pitch to others is up to you. But you need to understand each of these beats for you to truly understand your venture from all angles.

When in doubt, focus on the big picture of the 3-Act Structure. Start with the bottom-up user story, then transition into the top-down venture story, and then end with the story of where your team is going, with a particular emphasis on laying out a concrete vision for your next destination, Point C. Too many pitches focus only on Act II, leaving the audience to fill in too many blanks on who your target audience is and where you are going from here.

No. Not for a presentable deck, which is what I am focusing on. One of the biggest storytelling mistakes is to use one deck to make a story that is both presentable and sendable. These are two different storytelling challenges. I recommend focusing on making a presentable deck first. (If you only want to do the work once, then use a tool like Loom to present your deck as an asynchronous video.) The second biggest storytelling mistake is to forget that slides are for speaker support. Use as little text as possible on your slides. If someone is reading while you are talking, they are not paying attention to you. With these two rules in mind, it doesn't make sense to think about slide numbers. Each slide should support a main point. You can make that point in a beat. And you can click from beat to beat like a metronome. A presentable, beat-driven, visual 54 slide deck often goes by more quickly than a sendable, dense, text-heavy 7-slide deck.

Yes and no. For some audiences, they won't pay attention unless you hook them with how big the opportunity is early on. In that case, give them a taste of it up front. Spend no more than 30 seconds framing the size of the opportunity to hook them and then dive into the concrete user journey, returning to the opportunity size in Act II. The problem occurs when you overcorrect for this feedback and you just jump straight into Act II, staying at the big, abstract level and never grounding your venture in your user journey.

Yes, you want to serve a large addressable market. But you don't do that by designing for everybody. If you try to serve everybody, you serve nobody. Instead, you should be able to describe the one target user that you want your team and your audience to be thinking about when you design your business. And you need to show how it would work for them. Once you have established that baseline, you can then prove your case for another audience segment. You can introduce a new character and briefly show how it would work for them as well. By the end of Act I you'll then be able to credibly zoom out to a larger market size or adjacent verticals.

You have to know what your audience cares about and adjust accordingly. But I don't think that means not talking about your target user. It may mean that you need to do some brief (30-seconds or less) framing up front for the size of the opportunity and/or why you are about to talk about the vision for a specific user journey two years from now. Providing framing is fine. Skipping the user is not. Also, again, I want to emphasize that you should make this pitch your own. Your pitch should probably not start with "Meet [User Name]" by your final iteration. Find your unique language for introducing your user.

This is a common hang-up I get early on, especially with my clients that work in journalism who are so used to telling the facts only. Here's how to think of it. Act I is your opportunity to lay out a vision for a future user journey that you have not built yet. It is your job as a leader to lay out that vision. That inherently means telling a story of something that does not currently exist. Act III is your opportunity to clarify what exists today and what you plan to build. Your pitch combines a vision (Act I) with a reality check (Act III). If it helps, you can briefly set context for Act I saying that you want to take your audience to a vision for what you think is possible two years from now and that you will then tell them the plan to get there.