The Role of Effective Storytelling in Product Management

Communication skills are required for product managers who work with different team members including tech and non-tech people.

The recent post by the author of Mindtheproduct blog describes the story of the product manager at Coinbase, who shares how she taps into humanity by using storytelling to align teams, connect with customers and communicate with stakeholders.

Here’re the most fruitful extracts:

What makes an effective story?

Every good story should consist of a solid framework, outline the situation and bring listeners into the mind of the users/clients.

Anna Marie, the product manager of Coinbase, outlines the following framework she uses to tell stories:

• Create and develop empathy
• Establish context
• Describe the conflict
• Resolve their conflict

Use storytelling to get buy-in from stakeholders

PMs need stakeholder buy-in when making key decisions on the direction for their product. It’s about the moments when we normally come into a room with presentations full of charts, graphs, and metrics. This time is the period when storytelling can be powerful to sell in our vision and connect everyone to the end user.

Here’re some moments that product managers face where they can incorporate storytelling to influence the stakeholders.

• What you want to build. Demonstrate the problem you’re addressing for your users and the impact you’ll make on their lives with your product.
• What you want to kill. Establish the narrative of what the world was like when you built that feature. What did it do for your users then? What is the world like now?
• The story of your user research or test results. What did you learn from your research or test results?

Add storytelling to your everyday work

Don’t limit the use of storytelling to major presentations for stakeholders. Use it as a way of thinking that we build into our everyday work.

Here are some ways we can add storytelling into how we work with our teams on a daily basis:

• the story of what this feature will enable
• the story of why we should fix this bug
• the story of why we’re here, etc.

Using stories humanizes product decisions, enabling PMs to get buy-in, and help their teams connect with customers. What storytelling experience and insights do you have?