Storytelling — Product Leadership Blog

Product Storytelling: How Matthew Arnold Used a Comic to Share His Product Strategy

Storytelling is a critical skill for product people. And it’s often not enough to tell your story one time in one format—you need to experiment with sharing it many times in many formats to find what works best for your company and stakeholders. This is why I love this story from my coachee, Matthew Arnold, Director of Product at Brain in Hand. Matthew knew that he needed a way to communicate his product vision and strategy—or “stratevision” as he calls it—and he landed on a solution that’s both simple and effective: a comic.

Leadership Communication 1o1: How to Make Sure Your Messages Stick

How much time do you spend communicating with the other people in your organization? Chances are, it’s not enough. Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar, told the MTP Engage Leadership Forum that she spends 50% of her time on internal communication. This was such an important tidbit that I called it out as a key learning in my blog recap of the event.

Communication is one of those tricky skills. Since we all do it all the time, we tend to think we’re much better at it than we actually are. But there’s often a gap between the way we view ourselves as communicators and the way our teams view us. Here are a few of the most common communication problems I see in product organizations.