Product Level 2 - Storytelling, a product management superpower
How to create a product story that your users can connect with, and your internal team can align around
Storytelling is a tangible skill that can help you level up from a good product manager to a great one. Framing your product, its features, and its strategy within a wider story helps you ensure that decisions are rooted in the “why”, and not just the “what”.
It also allows us to more easily avoid common pitfalls in software development such as scope creep, missed deadlines, burnt out and frustrated teams, and confused customers.
Having a clear and well understood story will act as a lightning rod to facilitate collaboration and co-creation. A fundamental need for a highly functioning team is passion about what you’re doing, and your story connects everybody’s work with your mission. It makes it all matter.
Once you have your story created, you can pull it out in any number of situations to more effectively communicate with your team, stakeholders, or customers, such as when you are:
Selling a vision for a product, service, or feature
Getting others to buy into your strategy (product, go-to-market)
Presenting product designs
Illustrating why a certain trade-off decision was made
Presenting a product roadmap
Creating product marketing materials
As a great product manager, it’s up to you to create, share, and evangelize your product story.
What goes into a story?
In any good story, you’ll find some typical characteristics such as:
Protagonist - the hero of your story. When talking about a product story, your protagonist is always your user, not your product
Acts - the major structural components in your story. There are typically three important acts to cover:
Situation - presents reality
Complication - builds tension
Resolution - brings closure
The acts can be presented in any number of ways, either linearly (situation -> complication -> resolution), or not! Don your inner-Tarantino, and feel free to get creative - starting the story off directly with the complication or even the resolution can be excellent ways to compile a more compelling narrative
Hook - something that gets people’s attention. This should be something relate-able or emotional that can be used to captivate your audience early on, and make them invested in sticking around until the end of the story
Button - a technique to end a story satisfyingly with a strong resolution or closing argument. It should try to arouse curiosity, or an emotional response
Starting off with these elements will give you a good, clear, and understandable story off the bat. However, elevating your story from a good one to a great one requires some more intangibles. What makes a story great?
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”
- Simon Sinek, Author & Speaker
Great stories are simple.
They are strongly edited down to the most important elements, and presented in easy-to-understand ways
Great stories have inherent conflict
Something that grips the reader’s emotions. If you can create a story that users can connect with emotionally, you’ve won them, because now they’ve found a product built just for them
Great stories have a hero
The hero brings change to the world, and the reader is that hero. You also need to make sure the reader can see themselves as that hero
Can you change your story?
Yes - your story does not have to lock you in forever, but remember that if you ever do change your story, even just a small piece of it, you need to reevaluate everything from end-to-end. From a product sense, this means being prepared to kill features and lose customers in order to pivot.
A real world example is a startup that was called Burbn - a location-based check-in site setting out to provide social engagement amongst whiskey lovers.
At the time, check-in apps were very common, but the app had a photo-sharing feature that was quite unique, and getting a lot of use. However, those users weren’t utilizing that feature in the way the founded expected. Something didn’t line up with the product’s story. It was time to pivot.
In that pivot, the founders went back to the drawing board, stripped Burbn down entirely, leaving nothing but the photo-sharing, “liking,” and commenting features. They now had a new story, and an entirely new product ready to fulfill it - Instagram.
Creating your story
Storytelling is inherently a creative process, so there is no magic formula. I came across a number of methods while researching this topic, and after practicing with some of those, I merged together what I felt really worked for me and my own style and outlined this process.
As you go through this with your own stories - try to pay attention to what worked for you! If you didn’t connect with something, discard it. And on top of it all, be creative! Sometimes being different can be a hook all unto itself.
Step 1 - Write
With these starter prompts, just write, one section at a time. Don’t worry about making it perfect. If you end up with a new line of thought, just jump into it. We’ll go back through and clean it all up later.
Start by answering these questions, or just using them as inspiration points - there is no right or wrong way to go about this, but at the end you’ll hopefully see the very rough makings of a story, ready to be chiseled out of this.
The Hero
Who are you trying to influence with this story?
What do you want them to feel?
What do you want them to do?
The Problem
What is the context in which your users will use your product? When will they use it, and why?
What is the conflict/problem? What conditions led to this conflict?
Why should they care? What is their emotional connection to this problem?
What are their obstacles to solving that problem currently?
The Solution
How does your product/feature/service solve their problem?
What is the emotional result to solving this problem for them?
What does their “new world” look like, with this problem solved?
What has the hero achieved / gained / regained by using your solution?
Remember these tips while you’re working through this:
The hero in your story is your user, not your product
Make sure there’s an emotional connection for your hero
If you find yourself describing your product or features, stop, reset, and focus on the bigger picture
Step 2 - Compile
As promised - now that you have a lot of thoughts on the page, start to extract your story. Pay attention to ensuring you’ve captured the various acts (situation, conflict, resolution). At the end of this step, you should have a (probably bad) story, but a complete story.
Step 3 - Simplify
Great stories are concise. Start by chopping it all up, and try to make it half as long. I would encourage you to try starting fresh with a new pass of the story - now that you’ve put it all on paper once, you’ll have a better idea of what’s really important.
Also consider, is there something relatable that you can use to simplify the story? Some metaphor or analogous story?
Step 4 - Enhance
Now that the major elements are n the page, let’s revisit some of the key elements of storytelling to make sure it’s engaging:
What is your hook? Be honest - is it good?
Can you “Tarantino” your story, and rearrange the sections (eg. the situation / complexities / resolution) to make for a more compelling narrative?
Do you have a “button” ending?
This isn’t required, but if you are expecting a user to take some action after reading/hearing this story, make sure there’s a nice emotional close to it
Check for these common mistakes:
Is your user the hero, or is your product?
Are you talking about features?
Double check that emotional connection - is it present, obvious, and the skeleton of the entire story?
Step 5 - Polish & Share
Try another pass at making your story more concise - is there any fluff left that can be dropped?
Share it to get feedback from colleagues and stakeholders, then continue to make adjustments - it’s expected that creating a good story will take some iteration
Action Items
As with our previous post on customer interviews, this is a skill that will take practice, and trial & error to really hone. From the get-go, remember that stories are made to be told, and no story is perfect on the first telling.
Difficulty: Novice - Practice telling a story about a personal experience
Difficulty: Beginner - Think of a product you use everyday (and enjoy), and write the story for that product
Tip: Afterwards, check out their marketing materials, and look at how they’re positioning their own story
Difficulty: Expert - Create your story for your own product
Difficulty: Guru - Share your story with two colleagues or stakeholders and begin iterating
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