Don’t Convince. Inspire!
Lessons on storytelling and product evangelizing.
We learn from a very young age that storytelling helps us to get what we want. Stories light up our brains, entertain us, captivate us, and help us gain new insights. And this is why, as product people, storytelling is an essential skill. It’s the key to sharing our vision and ideas with our teams, our stakeholders, and our companies at large.
But many of us have strong inner critics that prevent us from being confident storytellers. In this talk—my very first at Mind the Product London—I offer some tools and tricks to help you overcome your inner critic and become a better storyteller.
We all like to engage with content in different ways. That’s why I’ve provided a variety of formats below—a video recording, slides, written transcript, and visual recording of the highlights from the talk. Check out whichever format resonates with you and please be sure to share with any colleagues who you think would enjoy it!
Talk Inspiration - As mentioned in my Talk
A perfect example of how powerful it is to use words that light up other people’s brains. Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter - watch
Do you think storytelling based on a lot of data is boring? Not if you are listening to Hans Rosling - watch
A great speaker telling stories that matter to you Simon Sinek on why good leaders make you feel safe - watch
Complex topic explained well: Al Gore: The Case for Optimism on Climate Change - watch
Matthew McConaughey winning Best Actor at the Oscars. Pay attention to the simple, powerful structure: Something to look up, something to look forward, something to chase - watch
One of the best product demos ever: Steve Jobs iPhone 2007 Presentation - watch
Not possible to not listen to him! We need to talk about an injustice: Bryan Stevenson - watch
Nancy Duarte: The Secret Structure of Great Talks - watch
Visual Recording
Transcript
Hello, lovely Product people from all over the world! Glad to be here today to talk about storytelling and product evangelizing.
It is part of my job as a product leadership coach to help people get from basically no professional storytelling skills closer to the Steves and Baracks of this planet. And I'm on this virtual stage today to share what I've learned in countless coaching sessions. So this talk is packed with tips and tricks for product people to improve their storytelling and product evangelizing skills.
Let's start with a bit of a task. Take pen and paper (or your preferred note-taking app) and note down the answers to the following questions.
What is your favorite fiction book/novel?
What is your favorite character in that story?
How did you feel while reading it?
Have you once felt the same excitement after an actual event, like someone giving a talk, sharing their vision? It could be a political speech, a talk at your company, a graduation speech or anything similar.
Who was the person talking/inspiring you?
What was the occasion?
Would you like to be as inspiring as the person you just noted?
But you struggle to picture yourself as a great storyteller? Let me help you re-frame storytelling to mute your inner critic. And to do so, I will share with you:
Why stories are important - especially if you are working in product
Why I call them a design tool
Why it´s pretty easy to improve your storytelling capabilities. I therefore will talk about:
Structures and ingredients of compelling stories
Some great resources to learn more about storytelling and product evangelizing
Why stories are important
While we are not exactly born telling stories (because we can’t speak from the beginning!), each one of us has the ability to tell stories from a very early age—it’s built into our DNA. We perfect our storytelling skills throughout our childhood because we learn early on that a good story helps us to get what we want.
Parents in the room know what I’m talking about. It just happened this summer when my 3yo wanted to wear her winter to Kindergarten. At first, I was not convinced that it was good to wear these heavy boots on a hot summer day. But once she told me that she and her best friend want to play Frozen in Kindergarten and that it is necessary to wear winter boots as part of her costume for an authentic performance, I said yes to her request. By making her wish part of a bigger narrative, she was more convincing.
And it’s not only the active storytelling: We love to listen to stories from a very early age because they entertain us, captivate us, and help us to gain new insights. Stories have this attraction because they light up our brains. The have a biological impact on us, triggering the release of hormones that act on us in very powerful ways:
Oxytocin, which causes us to build trust, generosity, and a personal connection
Endorphins, which can make someone laugh or help them deal with fear, pain, or uncertainty
Dopamine, which leads to a desire to know what happens next when you tell a story with peaks and troughs that lead to cliffhangers
Many of the things mentioned here are useful in our product management practice. Wouldn’t it be good to help people build trust and help them deal with uncertainty?
After learning these things about stories I would totally agree with Carl Alviani. He pointed out in a post, “We think in stories, remember in stories, and turn just about everything we experience into a story…”
This ability to use stories to convince others to work with us to solve problems—particularly as a group—has given our species Homo sapiens, a unique evolutionary advantage that has enabled us to collectively survive and thrive on this planet. Thousands of years ago, it was working together cooperatively to hunt down dinner. Today, it’s working together to resolve the COVID-19 pandemic.
What Stories Do
As you have probably experienced throughout your career, it takes a story to unite a group of people—from a small product development team to an entire company.
Stories are the tool that enables one person to get others excited about using their skills and know-how to solve a hard problem.
Companies with iconic brands are masters at telling stories. Even their shortest slogans (often, just a few words) can evoke images in the minds of customers that encourage their minds to wander to a better future. Think of Nike’s “Just do it,” or Apple’s “Think different,” or BMW’s “The ultimate driving machine.” And they have great personalities who tell these stories to the world, and also within their own organizations.
In my own experience, I have seen many products that never saw the light of day because the product manager was unable to tell a good story about it. As a result, the product team was uninspired and divided, and internal stakeholders were not convinced to support the effort. And I’ve really learned that the hard way. So, let me share my own storytelling story.
I was once product manager on a development team working on a job board product. And I was a busy bee back at that time: I consistently nailed backlog management and prioritization, held well-prepared team rituals, and got things done.
Our team’s output was great as well, but the stuff we released wasn’t making a big difference—we didn’t got much feedback from our users, the traction metrics looked very poor, and we constantly had to argue about the things we were planning to do with our stakeholders.
I was doing all the product discovery work with our designer and one engineer, and we had already conducted quite a few product discovery initiatives to figure out what we were doing wrong. We kept adding features, but I was frustrated because I didn’t know what we could do to build products that made a difference.
I’ve decided to make this frustration a topic for one of my next coaching sessions. My product coach at the time—Marty Cagan—was happy to jump on the topic and shared some of his observations. He pointed out that I wasn’t able to adequately explain what we had learned during product discovery well to the rest of the team and to the company. And I was not able to tie these learnings back to the bigger picture. So, important information was lost, sparks did not fly, and the team was neither inspired nor motivated by what we told them about our learnings and about what we could achieve next.
So, Marty helped me to make the connection between my pain and the potential solution of becoming better at product evangelizing. He in fact told me that my product evangelization and storytelling skills were nonexistent and that he thinks this might be a career staller. But as every great coach Marty did not only share his observation and help me realize that storytelling is something I should work on, he also left me with some ideas on how to start my self progression journey.
Marty recommended that I read Guy Kawasaki’s book, Selling the Dream, and I did exactly that. After reading the book, I realized how Guy Kawasaki's ability to tell great stories is vital to the overall Macintosh success story. I understood the critical importance of storytelling. Developing this skill changed the rest of my career as a product manager: I started telling stories that united my product development team, and convinced stakeholders. I helped marketing sell the product, and most importantly, I figured out what really mattered to our users and put them at the center of my stories.
And I’ve learned that ultimately, stories are a perfect design tool and good ones are essential for product evangelists.
I call them the perfect design tool because:
Everyone has the ability to create one
they’re easy to iterate on, and
they help you gain more clarity and reduce fluff while creating them.
So if you are finding yourself in endless stakeholder and team meetings, trying to convince them that your plan is good, the features are the right ones to build, and none of that resonates with the people you are talking to, then storytelling might be the missing piece of your skill puzzle.
The idea is to inspire our team, stakeholders and management, and users —not to convince them.
This is a new framing you could use for every meeting you have planned: If you find yourself in defensive mode, explaining things over and over again, pause for a moment and check if the situation calls for a good story. If “yes, probably” is the answer, make sure to make some room in your calendar to work on the stories you want to tell people to inspire them to the right actions or decisions.
Creating and telling a Good Story
A good story has a well-defined structure that makes it easy for people to understand and navigate. It has a beginning, a middle part and an end. Let me share one high-level structure that worked well for many PMs so far.
A story that helps others to get excited about something has a few key elements:
It paints a picture of a desirable future
It makes it clear why you should become part of this future
It acknowledges the current situation while describing the potential difficulties that may arise and why it’s worth overcoming them
It suggests a common goal with just enough information to make next steps clear for listeners
One story structure using these key elements and maybe the most well-known story structures is “the hero’s journey,” which was elucidated by professor of literature Joseph Campbell. The hero’s journey starts in the ordinary world with a call to adventure—which could be in the form of a big dream or desirable future—and progresses through a succession of challenges, tests, and trials before reaching the ultimate destination where the hero has achieved their goal and is transformed, sharing what they have learned with others.
In much the same way, we are called to adventure by the promise of a new product, or an improvement to an existing product.
To achieve our goal, we have to inspire and align our team and sell a vision for a product or a service or an idea we have.
We have to ask senior management for more budget, time, or people for our product team
Have to get others to buy into our strategy, help them make tough tradeoff decisions or present our next-steps roadmap.
And we have to explain the value of our product to users and customers while recognizing people and helping employees to build and create personal brands.
Writing your First Story
Ok, so now let’s assume I’ve inspired you to up your storytelling game: How would you approach creating your first story? Step #1 – make time for it in your calendar. Creating and writing down a story is a lot of work, but, if you do it right, you’ll be able to use the same story for months or even years. And it will save you hours of meetings convincing people that the things you are doing are the right ones to do. It is a bit of an upfront investment but it is worth the effort. So please make sure you have time for the actions suggested on the next slides.
To overcome the paralyzing fear of the blank page, I like to start PMs with the following short task (which gets you to a story MVP and in time can become a complete story). PMs simply fill in the blanks with their own situation, providing them with the basic elements they need to create a first, simple, compelling story:
We want to ________________________________
In order to _________________________________
Because if we don't, _________________________
Once you’ve done that you start to write a narrative. Open your preferred text editor and just start laying out the story.
I encourage product people to first decide if they want to put their team or the user in the center of the story. I then coach them to check if they do paint a desirable picture of the future and if they are explaining why it makes sense for them to be part of the journey.
I like to use the super short checklist of have I explained: why it makes sense for them individually to be part of your endeavor as well as why it makes sense for us as a team and us as a company or (ideally) humankind.
Acknowledge the difficulties that may arise. Try to understand your audience and their reservations carefully. You could even run casual interviews to understand all these reservations and where they are coming from. Communicate that you understand the reservations of your audience. And highlight that you believe in the talent and strength of the team and that you will figure out how to overcome the obstacles and kill the monsters that will stand in our way.
And finally make sure that you present the shared goal, create a sense of urgency and suggest the best next activities.
Now that you have your story, how do you ensure that it will stick?
Making Your Message Stick
Humans are clearly inspired and motivated by the written or spoken word—most of us have been inspired to action by a CEO or manager who painted a compelling vision of the future. But we are also inspired and motivated by images, drawings and illustrations. It’s a case where a picture really is worth a thousand words. I always tell my product people that if they want to make their message stick, they have to come up with various formats of their story. They have to cover all these aspects (written, spoken, illustrated) working together in unison.
When it comes to the narrative I coach them to prepare their story in three different lengths: short, medium, and long. To be able to tell their story in a compelling way in the various settings they might need to tell them.
Short is equivalent to an elevator pitch—no more than approximately 150 words or about 75 seconds. Research indicates that, when you tell a short, informative story to an executive online, their attention span maxes out at 75 seconds.
Medium is longer—about 900 words or 6 minutes. When you’re at this length, think in terms of presenting three “acts”—like the acts of a play—of 300 words each. You’ll tell people what you are going to tell them, then you’ll tell them, and finally you’ll tell them what you have told them. Jeff Bezos is famous for requiring his executives to write narratively structured six-page memos for presentations at Amazon. According to Bezos, “We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’”
Long is for when short or medium just won’t allow you to tell your story in a compelling way. Again, think in terms of acts—in this case, three acts of about 800 words each for a total of approximately 18 spoken minutes.
It’s no coincidence that TED talks have an 18-minute limit. Says TED curator Chris Anderson, “It is long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention…By forcing speakers who are used to going on for 45 minutes to bring it down to 18, you get them to really think about what they want to say.”
And, as you’ve no doubt noticed throughout this presentation, I am a big fan of drawings, illustrations, pictures, and other visual elements that help tell a story. So I encourage you to find pictures or illustrations that support the various versions of your story. If you struggle with that visual aspect, find colleagues that could pair up with you on that or dive into the art of sketch noting.
And once you’ve done all of that you are ready for your final round of story line refinements.
Here’s my checklist for this phase of the process:
Avoid using buzzwords, tool names, and abbreviations
Don’t use words that are used very often in your context or environment, such as “customer success”—people will tune them out
Follow the advice of David Axelrod (who helped Barack Obama to get his points across as one of his main campaign strategists) and check if the story you are sharing is relevant, important, and true. But beware of manipulation—storytelling can be misused, especially in a time where people look less at data and science and have a tendency to believe whatever fake news they are presented with so long as it is compelling.
Start telling your story to a small number of people. Observe how they are reacting to your story. Are they drawing the right conclusions? Are they asking the right questions? Did you succeed in inspiring them with your story? If they are struggling to envision the same bright future, you might want to go back to reflection mode and ask yourself: What do they know and do I need to share more details or insights to help them see what I see?
Check if the story really lights up the brains of your listeners. Make sure you use words that provoke emotions. Use words that trigger their senses, including smell, touch, vision, sound, and even taste. And please try to make them laugh.
And once that is done you want to start rehearsing sharing your story in its various formats. While doing so make sure you…
Show your curiosity and passion and be vulnerable while telling your story
Focus on speaking to the hearts and minds of your audience and not so much on convincing them of something
Recap - How about your inner critic?
And now, lets come back to your very own storytelling capabilities and the inner critic that keeps you from telling good stories. Are you confident of becoming a better storyteller after this talk? To make sure it does, let me recap some of my key arguments.
I want you to remember that:
Humans automatically think in stories
When we hear good stories they trigger something in us.
Stories help to facilitate group work by inspiring people to become part of a movement.
Everyone can tell stories in general --> but we often don't practice this art and therefore this skill atrophies.
It is worth investing in this skill.
It takes a few simple ingredients and structures to get started:
Think about the audience and what they want to achieve
Use a proven storytelling structure to ensure nothing is missing (e.g., the hero, the journey, the destination)
Make sure there are a variety of ways to tell this one story: short, medium, and long, as well as written, spoken, and illustrated.
Make it your story. You should be able to tell the story without lengthy preparation because it’s so good that it’s impossible to forget anything about it!
I hope this leaves you with enough motivation and tools to start a written narrative exercise tomorrow. And if you get stuck, come back to this talk or allow yourself to be inspired by some of the best storytellers of our time. Listen to them, try to understand the structures they are using for telling their stories, and apply some of their tricks to your stories and I’m sure your rating on the Jobs/Obama scale will improve dramatically.
Further REadings
How Stories Change the Brain - read on
Strategic Storytelling Is Product Management - read on
My product management toolkit: Storytelling - read on
Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development - read on
Storytelling for Product Managers - read on
72 Rules of Commercial Storytelling - read on
Nancy Duarte: The Secret Structure of Great Talks - read on
Talk Description
Short Description
Most product people know that storytelling and product evangelizing skills are essential in their roles. But many PMs struggle to build that muscle, especially if their inner critic is telling them that they are not a great storyteller. Sound familiar? Join this session if you want to mute your inner critic and learn more about the power of stories.
Petra will talk about the evolutionary advantage of telling good stories and why everybody has the power and ability to create them. Plus, she will share some hands-on tips and proven frameworks to help you improve your storytelling capabilities.
Long Description
Most product people know that storytelling and product evangelizing skills are essential if you want to convince a team to use their skills and know-how to solve a hard problem.
But many PMs struggle to build that muscle. This is especially challenging when your inner critic is telling you that you are not a great storyteller. Join this session if you are one of these PMs with a malicious voice in your head telling you your storytelling isn't good enough.
Petra will talk about the power of stories and why she calls them a design tool. Plus, she will share hands-on tips and proven frameworks to improve your storytelling capabilities.
Why focus on storytelling? With better stories, it will be much easier for you to:
Inspire your product development team
Unite stakeholders
Ask senior management for more budget
Help marketing sell the product
And most importantly, help users understand the value your product can add to their lives.