Lead people to the conclusion with the power of storytelling
Effective leaders use storytelling to communicate with confidence and credibility
Making a difference as a product leader relies on your ability to align everyone and get individual buy-in to drive change. You need stakeholders like the founder, CEO, and board members to believe in your vision and strategy. Daily, you need teams to be motivated by purpose and focus on what matters. To foster a product culture, you have to encourage experimentation and learning. All these areas are complex and involved, but they have one point of success or failure in common: the product leader's ability to communicate and influence effectively. This edition of the Confident Product Leader focuses on communicating using an approach scientifically proven by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner to be 22 times more memorable than sharing the data. This edition focuses on the habit of storytelling to communicate with confidence and credibility. Storytelling improves people's understanding, engagement and memorability of the message and is a key tool for all leaders.
I have helped product leaders communicate and influence with storytelling to support their goals. In some cases, their strategies were mediocre in mundane problem spaces with average team talent. Regardless of the scenario, these leaders achieved high motivation and fostered high levels of trust from their CEO and executive peers. These leaders succeeded, and their customer-focused teams supported business growth and customer satisfaction.
In these examples, thanks to great communication, the founder and board understood why the focus was where it was and believed in the product direction. This meant there was little (there's always some) founder involvement distracting the teams. The peers in the C-suite understood the product decisions. They might not like them, but they understood them enough to back them. They stopped continuously challenging and trying to push through distracting features they felt were vital to close a new deal or retain an existing customer. The product teams understood what they should be doing, which, thanks to the full C-suite buy-in, was focused without multiple facets. They enjoyed the product leader celebrating their part in the company's successes. With effective storytelling, you can prevent many product management pitfalls, giving your organisation an unfair advantage compared to the rest of your market.
You are not alone if you feel low in confidence
In coaching leaders such as CPO and VP of Product, who may be struggling with communication, a common hurdle to overcome is a lack of confidence. Sometimes, no matter what data the product leader presents, the founder or CEO ignores it and demands action in a conflicting direction. In other scenarios, the product leader has inherited a team with highly opinionated individuals who challenge every decision, denting the leaders' confidence. If you feel you are not good enough or feel nervous about sharing the critical message, trust me - you are not alone.
In every case of low confidence, simple preparation to plan how to communicate the message following a storytelling pattern has helped. If it sounds too easy, consider this quote from Rives Collins, a professor at Northwestern University, “Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times.” Put a different way; everyone can do it, including you!
If you don’t craft the story, your audience will
As a product leader, you must regularly explain challenging scenarios or sell ideas to secure approach and funding. As a professional, in both cases, you will have data to inform a decision and likely will present this data to secure support for a decision. However, it doesn’t always play out smoothly, and the final decision doesn’t always go your way. It can feel like your stakeholders don’t understand the customers or business. No matter what data you share, they seem to be stuck in their way of thinking and from your perspective, they make the wrong decisions.
Product leaders tell me they feel like they are repeating the same thing again and again, but nobody seems to pay attention. This is a very frustrating situation. They are demotivated, having to implement decisions they can see from the data are wrong. This stinks!
Feeling stuck is emotionally draining. Unfortunately, product leaders in this place lose credibility with the founder or CEO and the leadership team. If nothing changes, the inevitable outcome is the product leader leaves the employer, in many cases, with a serious drop in confidence and uncertainty about accepting a future leadership role. This can often be avoided with leadership coaching.
So what can be done to improve the situation? Why do other people fail to hear your message?
Normally, where the audience for the message are not narcissists, the product leader presents the data, rather than the story the data supports. If you don’t provide a clear story, the audience if they are engaged at all, will make up their own. When this happens, it is down to luck that their conclusion agrees with yours.
Fostering trust and helping the right decisions win
Product leaders who empower storytelling take their audience on a journey and lead them to conclusions. The journey is clear and concise. One aim is to make the complexity simple. This means the product leader needs to have the confidence to leave lots of detail out of the story. I have seen strategy decks with 100s of slides when the audience needs to know the 3 top areas of focus this year. A good story will use only a few data points to give credibility and help the audience believe it. This doesn’t mean the research and evidence are not needed. You can’t skip that work!
When the story is delivered confidently, and the path to the conclusion is easy to map, the audience starts to trust the storytelling and buy into the outcomes.
Real-world example
I want to share the experience of Kim (not her real name), who I coached for 18 months. Kim is VP of product in a large B2B technology company. There were over 800 engineers and multiple layers of the product management hierarchy. She was part of a working group led by the CEO focused on strategies to strengthen the market share of their adjacent product lines. The core product line had strong customer retention, it was very sticky and difficult to change. However, their broader product lines were suffering from churn. The working group had identified and agreed that their products needed to serve a new persona they had previously completely ignored.
The problem was executing this decision in a large business with many conflicting priorities. Despite multiple all-hands meetings sharing the importance of this new persona, teams were not prioritising this new persona. The working party report had been shared company-wide, sharing all the data they had reviewed. Kim had added metrics related to the new persona to various performance tracking reports. She was questioning the progress in her various meetings. But again and again in the heat of product development, when compromises had to be made, tasks related to the new persona were dropped.
It was very frustrating for Kim. Churn was not getting better. Her CEO was getting more assertive about change being made. Kim was tempted to make dictatorial demands and force change using the power of her job title. However, she knew this was a mistake. It would damage the product culture and negatively impact the teams' performance. It might be a long-term, hundred-million-dollar mistake! But not shifting priority would be a short-term, hundred million dollar failure and career limiting, or worse, career killing!
After listening to her staff and reflecting, Kim recognised the management level in her organisation, group product managers, needed to care about this new persona. It was not as simple as forgetting about the other personas, but they had to start putting this new one first more frequently.
Kim learned about storytelling and used a simple template to prompt her to draft a story for the group product managers. She revised and improved the story, and finally, she used a skeleton plan to write her communication.
Using her skeleton story plan, she wrote a slide deck for a group product manager meeting. She wrote a three-sentence version of the story she could repeat frequently when she bumped into group product managers. She also created a single slide that shared the story so she could sprinkle it into various meetings to repeat the message.
Kim told the story ten times over the four weeks leading up to their quarterly planning sessions. The group product manager put forward various plans in the quarterly planning, including some related to this new persona. Throughout the quarter, compromises were made, as usual, but this time, the new persona was typically prioritised. By the year's end, the tracking metrics showed real improvement with this new user, and the lagging churn metric was trending positively.
Kim had avoided two separate hundred-million-dollar mistakes and embraced storytelling in most communications from then on. This win became a career-defining moment.
Always be prepared using the Five Ps
Hollywood is in the business of telling stories. Their stories are entertaining and unlikely to share critical data to influence decisions, but the fundamentals are the same. Underpinning every story is the context setting, followed by intrigue, action, and the outcome.
To start with storytelling, a good habit is to make notes of key projects and activities using the five Ps. It is less planned like in the example with Kim, instead this technique aims to help you respond with a story when you are put on the spot.
Project: the project or initiative in focus.
Progress: the current status.
Pivotal Points: key moments or learnings that have triggered action.
Pressures: the key reasons making it tricky.
Plan: the action you are taking.
If you make your notes summarising these five key areas and respond through each in order, you will naturally tell a story that is easier to understand than fact followed by fact followed by decision.
How to plan your story
In the real-world example, Kim had more time to prepare her story. With 10 to 20 minutes of effort, you can plan a strong story to share your message and take people on the journey. I have helped hundreds of product leaders use this process, and it is not difficult. The key is experimenting with the framing before spending too much time writing copy. The process has two steps. First, you use the Story Foundation Builder and try a few variations out, then when you are satisfied, you move on to the Story Writer.
The Story Foundation Builder focuses on the goal, the audience and the why. It starts with the “message”, which, in a few words, should capture what you are trying to say. Then, the “so what” to determine why this matters. The “who” defines your audience, and “new understanding” focuses on what you want your audience to know that they did not know before. “Immediate goal” clarifies what outcome you want straight away, while “longer-term goal” defines the aims this will contribute to over time.
When Kim did this, it looked something like:
Why…
The Message: Prioritise the new persona.
So What: Churn won't improve, and some products could be shut down.
Audience…
Who: Group Product Managers.
New Understanding: New personas are being underserved and are dissatisfied.
Goal…
Immediate Goal: Prioritise initiatives to help the new persona.
Longer Term Goal: Reduce churn.
The idea is to write down only a few words in each box. This makes it easier to throw it away and try a different framing. The second step is the Story Writer. This goes through the typical story arc to plan out how to narrate the story.
There are nine boxes, but only one box is about the action. As leaders, we often make the mistake of communicating most about the action we want people to take. If we want people to buy in, they need to understand the context, comprehend why we are talking about this now, clearly see what we are trying to achieve, appreciate the impact of doing nothing, recognise what is in the way and then buy into the action. The majority of a good story is setting the scene before the action.
The Story Writer has the following sections:
Context: What project, when, where, etc.
Characters: Who is closely involved or impacted, and who will save the day? (normally, the person you have to do the action).
Trigger Event: What happened that kicked this story off? Maybe a key learning, a competitor action, a change to legislation, etc.
Goal: What are we trying to achieve?
Risk Impact: What will go wrong if you don't achieve the goal?
Challenge: Why is it so hard? What is the obstacle?
Action: What has to happen to move forward?
Lessons: What have we learned to help justify this is a good way forward?
Big Takeaway: What is the long-term win?
When you fill this in, refer to the Story Foundation Builder and add more detail. Do not overly worry about wordsmithing it now. This is your plan, not the final copy. Use the completed Story Writer to build your slides, write your report, or simply as a prompt in a meeting.
But why do people ignore the facts?
To understand why people ignore your facts and make up their own stories and conclusions, we must look at how decisions are made. According to Arthur Lefford, author of “The Influence of Emotional Subject Matter on Logical Reading”, 90% of human decisions are based on emotions. Humans use our conscious mind to justify our unconscious emotional decisions. Daniel Kahneman’s work on loss aversion, which shows how humans value loss around ten times bigger than wins, further strengthens that decisions are less logical than we might prefer to believe.
The forgetting curve, initially defined by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghause, found up to 90% of information received is forgotten after one week. It is commonly recognised that 70% of information is lost within 24 hours of training.
Karen Eber, the Chief Storyteller at Eber Leadership Group and ex-learning and development officer for General Electric, shares in her TED Talk that facts and data shared in meetings only engage two parts of the brain, but the same information delivered as a story fires most of the brain including the Temporal Lobe, Occipital Lobe and Parietal Lobe. She explains that when the whole brain is engaged, we have better comprehension and increased memory recall.
The power of storytelling brings your audience with you. They are less distracted and less likely to go on a tangent to discover their own conclusions.
Empathise with your audience
To successfully frame the story, you must empathise with your audience. What do they care about, and why is it important for them? In the example, Kim recognised the group product managers cared about people loving the product. This is why her “new understanding” focused on people being underserved.
Empathising can be difficult. Here are some questions for you to consider that might help you step into their shoes.
What does your audience care about?
What do they fear or worry about?
What is their big priority right now?
What might be an emotional challenge for them?
What is a win for them?
How are they incentivised?
How can you make things easier for them?
Common Mistakes
Prepared storytelling is far easier than you may have thought. After doing it a few times, the above templates will take you 10 minutes to complete. But there are still some gotcha’s to avoid. The most common I see is forgetting to make the story about humans. Business is full of data, and it is easy to forget the people involved, so put the customer and people's emotions in the story.
When you use evidence to add credibility, keep it concise, especially statistics and graphs. The more data will encourage more interpretation. Qualitative evidence is compelling and more human; the right snippet can be very powerful. Never use data you do not understand or do not know where it came from. The typical questions your audience will ask to strengthen credibility will be to challenge the data. If you don’t know, it instantly destroys trust. It would be better to have no data than some you don't understand.
There is only one small box on the Story Foundation Builder for “the message”, so keep it to one simple message. Do not overcomplicate and confuse your audience.
Top tips to getting started
If this is a new topic for you, start using the Five Ps. In your next 1:1 with a team member, take notes about their work status using this new format.
When you are ready, pick a safe place to practice that is lower risk. It doesn’t have to be a major decision or a big event. Pick a message you will have to communicate and give it a go. Start with the story foundation builder and the story writer, and then write your comms. It might be for a team meeting, an email to one person, whatever it is remove the fear of change and pick something you're comfortable with to try it out.
Let me know how you get on, and if you are stuck, feel free to drop me a message - I am easy to reach on LinkedIn.
Further learning
I mentioned Karen Eber, her TED Talk is a great watch.
Jeff Gothelf wrote this useful article on HBR on storytelling to make or break your leadership.
If you want more help, you can find out about product leader coaching with me at my website www.righttoleft.co.uk.