Show Don't Tell (The Wall)
Lay out the entire user journey — pixel by pixel, minute by minute — on one physical wall.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
Where the PRFAQ is the written artefact of working backwards, Show Don't Tell is the visual one. The PM assembles every collateral of the journey — the trigger, the marketing message, the first screen, every pixel and word — for a named person (not a persona), and pins them together on a wall. For real-time marketplaces you also plot the parallel journeys and the user's emotional state minute by minute. It becomes the single place stakeholders gather to argue about the product with actual evidence in front of them.
Origin
Rathi's own extension of the Amazon working-backwards discipline: 'show don't tell is essentially an extension of what we were talking about... from working backwards'. Practised at Swiggy; the leadership variant he calls Strategy on a Page, which he notes others call growth loops.
Core principles
- 01Person, not persona: name them, age them, give them last month's behaviour, their fears and frustrations.
- 02Start at the trigger, not at app-open: what happened at 11:00 that made this person open the app?
- 03Every pixel, every word of copy must be in service of what the person came for.
- 04For real-time marketplaces, plot the parallel journeys (customer, delivery partner, restaurant) on the same timeline.
- 05Always build two walls: current version and new version, so you can compare and contrast.
- 06The leadership version — Strategy on a Page — puts the whole company funnel on one page, and again in three variants.
How to run it
- 1
Define a person, not a persona
Replace the generic user with a specific individual: 'Lenny, 30 years old, doing ABCD, earning this much, his relationship with food delivery is X, here's what he did in the last month and the last three days, here are his needs, desires, aspirations, fears, frustrations.'
Pro tip Rathi says roughly 50% of his product reviews are spent on this part alone.
Watch out Generic personas produce generic journeys — the whole method collapses without the specificity.
- 2
Recreate the exact triggering situation
Ask what time it is, what happened, why this person opened this app right now. Then follow forward: given that, do we have the right way forward for them to achieve what they came for?
Watch out 'Somebody will be doing this and reaching here' is the assumption that kills it — recreate the situation, don't assume it.
- 3
Assemble every collateral onto the wall
Bring in marketers and other functions and physically build out the journey: literally the first screen, each subsequent screen, each pixel, each copy line, in sequence.
Pro tip Do a Show Don't Tell of the CURRENT version alongside the new one so you can explain to anyone, instantly, why you're changing something.
- 4
Plot the parallel and emotional timelines
For marketplaces, map what happens on the other side simultaneously: the 30 minutes between order and delivery, the scenarios (restaurant is late, the rider's bike gets punctured), and what the consumer is feeling at each point.
Pro tip This is what prunes the random product/chatbot designs that would otherwise be plausible.
- 5
Scale it up to Strategy on a Page for leaders
The product-leader version: put the whole strategy on one page — what the market looks like, which users we get and why, activation budgets, how many convert to the next stage, cross-pollination, whether we need a membership programme, which levers we press. Produce three of these too.
Pro tip This is how a product leader gets CXOs aligned on one strategy that can then be told to the whole company.
Watch out Its main payoff is alignment, not novelty — don't measure it purely by whether it produced a new idea.
In the wild
After a user orders, there are 30 minutes before food arrives. The team plotted the parallel journeys and scenarios — restaurant delay, punctured bike — against the user's emotional state at each moment, showing the whole thing in real time on the wall.
→ It cut out a large space of plausible-but-wrong product designs (including chatbot flows) and got the marketplace sides designing together.
Instead of an elevator pitch, the wall becomes the one common place where all stakeholders gather and have a detailed discussion of why this choice versus another.
→ Rathi reports the biggest impact is alignment — teams finally see which part of the whole picture they own and how their work connects to everyone else's.
Common mistakes
Doing it once and calling it done
Rathi explicitly rejects the 'once a year and keep it updated' framing. It's a living artefact — every PM should have a current-version wall and a new-version wall, all the time, so the comparison is always available.
Talking through the journey instead of showing it
Elevator-pitch descriptions let ideas stay superficial. Making it concrete — every screen, every word — is what exposes 'actually that's a terrible idea' before it's built.
Is it for you?
Best for
PMs and product leaders on complex or multi-sided consumer products where stakeholder alignment and onboarding quality are the bottleneck
Not ideal for
Small feature teams shipping incremental backlog items, or fully-automated backend products with no human journey to plot
From the transcript
“there's a concept of person not personas”
“it's called the wall it also becomes one common place where you can get all the stakeholders in”
“there's also product leaders version of doing this L which is which I call strategy on a page”
“I think the largest impact that happens here is on alignment”
From the episode
The full-stack PM
Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart)