Product Managers are Storytellers

Storytelling is the vivid description of ideas and experiences through stories that evoke powerful emotions. Stories impact us on an emotional level, and emotions motivate us to act.

Well guess what people? Successful products are all about enticing experiences and actions! If you can get the users of your product hooked to the story enough that they get invested to return for more, you’ve got a winner.

Sure your product features, fast response times, competitive differentiators, affordable pricing, quick ROI, and whatever else matter. But if you cannot wrap that in a captivating story for your customers, you’re just yet another fish in a big, crowded sea. A compelling story strengthens your customers’ relationship with not only your product, but also with you and the brand you represent. There’s a great article by ProductSchool that explains how Apple’s stronger emotional connection with customers, compared to Samsung’s, has given it such a huge, unbreakable, loyal customer base.

So what exactly is a captivating product story made up of? There are two parts to this. One that engages our emotional right side of the brain, and one that engages our analytical left side of the brain.

Build a narrative around your Why

This should not come as a surprise. Anything we do as Product people needs to always, ALWAYS, connect back to the Why. And I don’t mean the kind of Why that ends up as “Our why is that we want customers to complete workflow xyz faster”. I mean the kind of Why that ends up as “Our why is we want people to be able to spend more time relaxing with family.” Something that taps into your target persona’s emotion by uncovering a ripple-affect symptom of their day-to-day activities. You need to touch something very deep in customer emotion with your Why.

ACCESSORIZE Your WHy with Data

It’s nice tapping deep into your customers’ emotional motivations, but it’s game-changing tapping into that emotion with solid data points.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Brene Brown

I absolutely love the above quote by Brene Brown. If we want to deliver product stories that sell, we need to add soul into them! Tell your target persona how much more time they will be able to spend with their family by using your product – 5 more minutes, 50 more minutes, a full day perhaps?! Now we’re talking. Now they’re hooked. They’re going to really listen now.

Because the thing is that the most successful products are seldom about the products themselves. They are about how those products make people feel. They let people do something they’ve been trying to do for a long time. They make people feel stronger, happier, more productive. They make people FEEL all the right feels!

So never stop telling compelling stories for your products. Both externally and internally. The stories you tell to your customers need to be just as impactful as the stories you tell to your C-Suite, cross-functional teams, dev teams, and so on. If you want to succeed in the Product world, you always need to be delivering strong narratives about your product(s) wherever you go.

The most beloved of people [is] the one who brings most benefit to people, and the most beloved of deeds [is] making [someone] happy, or relieving him [/her] of hardship.

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)