Archetypical case making

Traction contains something called the “50/50 rule”: for a given startup venture, fifty percent of one’s time should be spent on product and the other fifty percent should be spent on sales and marketing. Colloquially: spend as much time building the thing as one does talking about the thing. Even more colloquially: build s**t and talk to people. Product management has a similar 50/50 dynamic when it comes to working in a domain versus working across them. The inevitable nerd sniping and hyping in one area needs to be reconciled with the interfacing and integrating of inputs and decisions from multiple domains. 

This double-I-ing is one of my favourite aspects of the product adventure, and it’s become increasingly apparent to me that its heart contains a core capability: getting people to care. Specifically, galvanising an at best interested and at worst hostile audience to care about something within the confines of a minimally resourced, time-boxed event. “Getting buy-in”; “creating unity”; “achieving alignment”; “manufacturing consensus”; the mythical ability to make the case. How does one do it?

Executive leadership provides a good reference point. Executives essentially concern themselves with value enforcement, leadering and case making. They’re chief case makers, responsible for targeted resonance production. Domain and cross-domain leaders, managers and so on are also case makers, although they do a pared-down version of executive case making for smaller units of work at a higher rate of throughput and for lesser stakes. The best of ’em have an uncanny capacity to make the case; how do they do it? One avenue that leads to the answer is archetypes.

Consider an arbitrary venture. “Venture” can, of course, mean the sort of thing requiring venture capital, but it could also mean an individual or collective side project, an academic spinout, a traditional SME, or even a unit of work or project within an organisation that exceeds a certain scale or scope. In any case, its survival and thrival requires that people care. The elicitation of that care can be achieved via six different archetypical cases:

• The user case: the fundamental value proposition made to a core user
• The business case: the systems enabling value creation, delivery and capture
• The market case: the macro environment or competitive landscape’s latent upside
• The team case: the character and pedigree of the people involved
• The narrative case: the pull of a mission or vision
• The technological case: raw innovations or novel cross-applications of technology

In most attempts at case making there’s at least one archetype at play—often three to five are touched on. However, the most effective cases prioritise a sole archetypical aspect. Emphasising everything emphasises nothing, after all.

The user case is focused on the value created for the customer or end user. It’s about comprehension and compassion; understanding their pain (and its alleviation), their goals (and how X allows their attainment) and the jobs they have to do. Relevant useful fictions for user case construction include the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, value proposition design, and opportunity solution trees, as well as a bunch of other mappings.

The business case is focused on the structures, processes and relationships that enable the consistent creation, delivery and capture of value. Most business cases do require a minimal viable user case but the emphasis tends to be on cost structures or revenue generation, on strategically beneficial relationships or resources, or on cross-pollinating playbooks. Relevant useful fictions for business case construction are varied—it could be anything that touches value creation, delivery and capture, after all—but three that come immediately to mind are the Business Model Canvas, the Amazon flywheel and Leverage Points.

The market case is focused on the wider environment or landscape that an organisation is part of or a venture is embedded within. It’s about the plurality of agents, influences and resources in play and the dynamics of their entangled pasts, presents and futures. Relevant useful fictions for market case construction include the Seven Powers and the time-based strategic theory of John Boyd, as well as more typical market and competitor analysis methods.

The team case is focused on the people involved in the venture. It’s about their past—past performance being a decent predictor of future behaviour—or, lacking sufficient history, their pedigree or perceived potential. Relevant useful fictions for team case constructions are harder to pin down. Anything that compresses and presents a compelling variant of a team member’s past or possible trajectory is useful. Reverse engineering traditional and moneyball-like candidate evaluation and hiring methods, models, or tools is also worthy.

The narrative case is focused on the emotional resonance a venture provokes. It’s about the meaning attached to a venture, which can, of course, be negatively and/or positively orientated. Relevant useful fictions for narrative case construction include hero’s journeys, Freytag pyramids and numerous TV Tropes.

The technological case is focused on the reliable, cohesive compiling of knowledge and insight into reproducible forms and systems. It’s about the leverage of understanding within, around or across domains. Relevant useful fictions for technological case construction include Pasteur’s quadrant, sci-fi instruction manuals, imaginary ethnography, and other technology assessment methods.

As mentioned above, most case makers typically end up employing multiple archetypical cases in their making, and the best often prioritise one. Which those end up being is usually determined by the interplay of emergence, environmental adaptation, and pro- or retroactive min-maxing, but it has to be tethered. Because a case is a representation of a venture’s reality it tends to inherit the venture’s particular flavour of explore-explode-exploitiness. For example, a SaaS that drop-ships artisanal soap from Bangladesh is unlikely to be built atop a technological revolution, no matter how hard a case maker tries to ret-con the organisation’s journey. In contrast, GOOG case makers will happily state that their “mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, despite the actual origins being a little more modest.

The previous paragraph actually hints at the two main ways in which the archetypical cases can be leveraged. First, they can be used to construct cases for delivery to various audiences, from the generic and lowest-common-denominator appeal of different product collateral and artefacts, to the back-channeling that occurs in exclusive, wood-panelled rooms or aboard luscious yachts. Second, they can be used to deconstruct, tear-down and introduce some coherence to the analysis of received cases, such as the stream of applicants to startup accelerator programs or the competing avenues uncovered during product discovery.

To me, though, the more interesting scenarios for archetypical case leveraging are as a benchmark for collective message discipline and as a generator of divergence and dissonance within oneself or a team.

Roughly, message discipline can be characterised as the probability that two independent agents will make the same case given an identical scenario. Imagine an experiment in which two sales people get to pitch the same prospect. If their parent org exhibits high message discipline they’ll make the same or an equivalent case to the prospect. High message discipline is at least deterministic, and at best probabilistic in function across agents. I’m ignoring many other factors, naturally.

Archetypical cases as divergence and dissonance generators is a fun one. And flexible, too. One could interpret each archetypical aspect as a slider associated with a specific venture and see what happens when they get toyed with. What happens if you max out the narrative slider and zero out all the others? What scenarios are suited to exceptionally strong teams with extraordinary Fingerspitzengefühl for a domain and no clue how to reliably reproduce and scale their insight? They could also be used to red team alternative futures, conduct retrospectives, or provide baseline alterations to already developed tendencies and preferences.

Fair warning, though: like Jungian archetypes, the utility of the archetypical cases comes from their excessive generality. This is also their weakness; carving up the cases one makes or encounters using the archetypes can help one to see, but it can also inhibit awareness.