Storytelling for Product People: The Essentials

As children, we quickly learn that storytelling helps us to get what we want. When my daughter simply asks me if she can wear her winter boots to kindergarten during the summer, I’m unlikely to say yes. But if she explains to me that she and her best friend are playing Frozen and she needs the winter boots as part of her costume, it’s much easier for me to agree.

Now she has made the boots part of a much larger narrative and given me more context for her request.

It’s the same for us as product people. If we don’t do a good job telling the story of our product vision, our teams are uninspired and divided and our stakeholders don’t get on board. And worse, we might end up building products that don’t resonate with our customers. When we improve our storytelling skills, we can much more easily inspire our team members, stakeholders, and users. 

You might want to reframe storytelling and think about it more like you think about creating a prototype or click dummy. It is a tool that you could add to your PM toolkit.

If you’re worried that your storytelling skills are currently non-existent, that’s okay—that used to be me! I had some tough conversations with my coach at the time, Marty Cagan, who helped me to see how my lack of storytelling skills was holding me back and guided me toward some resources that helped me improve. 

In my talk at Mind the Product London + EMEA 2021, I explained why storytelling is so critical for product people and provided some frameworks and tips to help you develop these skills. 

A proven structure for a compelling story.

I know everyone likes to engage with content in different ways, so you have the option of watching the talk (please note that this recording will only be available for Mind the Product Prioritised members for 12 months) or reading the transcript, checking out the slides, or just skimming through the highlights in the visual recording on this page.