Mastering the art of storytelling as a Product Manager
Because it’s often not just about what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it.
One of the core strengths you develop as a Product Manager is communication. You’re the linking pin between engineering, design, data, and business (to name a few) so it’s only natural that written and oral communication play a big part of your role. So why not get good it, right?
Clear, crisp communication, that is to the point, is obviously important for meetings, email updates and general discussions, but Product Managers also play a big role in getting buy-in from different teams. From motivating to leaders why we should prioritise a particular problem and fund it’s solution to creating excitement and ownership among those who will help build, test and roll it out.
In my experience, one of the best ways to get buy-in from others is to use story-telling to take others on a journey with you whenever you present, talk or write about the products you’re building. Just like telling a good story, knowing your audience, how to draw their attention, using language to build empathy with your listeners/readers and speaking from experience are all skills that can improve how you communicate as a PM. These concepts can be quite vague if we just explain them, so instead, let’s a apply them to a particular scenario:
Scenario: You work for a company which is scaling and you notice that users are starting to complain about the quality of customer support. You spend some time getting familiar with the current experience and notice lots of ways the support team can be more empowered if they had better internal tooling. You have a meeting tomorrow where the leadership team will be present and want to use this opportunity to get buy-in. So let’s prepare…
Know your audience
Thinking about who you’re going to be talking to will help you figure out what to focus on. Very often, because of the detail we go into about a problem, we have so much to share and if everything feels important, it can be overwhelming preparing something like a slide deck on short notice. But sharing everything, cramming all that info into slides and giving every point the same attention, often means that nothing sinks in. It’s like a story without main characters or a plot without highs and lows.
So think about who is going to be in that room or call. Think about the context of the meeting — what do you want to have achieved with this group when it’s over? In our scenario, the goal is to get buy-in from leadership to build better tooling for the support team. Based on this audience, you could decide to focus on:
- Showing them how painful the current experience is for both end users and support staff by taking them through a common example.
- Quantifying the impact that better tooling can have on the quality of customer support and thus customer retention — this will grab their attention!
- Motivating for it to be one of the main projects we work on in the next 3 months by showing them a plan/timeline.
By knowing your audience, you know what to focus on and knowing what to focus on simplifies preparation, gives you structure and keeps your audience interested.
Draw their attention
Once you know what to focus on, you can structure everything else around that. If you’re using a presentation to compliment your speech, you can already create placeholder slides for each of the 3 focus areas we identified.
When presenting, your slides should compliment your speech, not replace or distract from it.
Just like telling a good story, there are a few tactics you can use to influence your audiences attention when you speak:
- Set the scene
You can set the scene by summarising up front that you’ve been looking into customer support and have identified inefficiencies that you want to bring attention to. You can manage expectations by stating up front the 3 areas you will be focusing on and that your goal is to get their support to make this a priority in the next 3 months. - Take them on a journey
Build the plot —you can start by walking them through a typical customer support experience, building empathy between your audience and the end users as you highlight every painful moment in their experience. Then bring in the proposed solution to save the day, sell it with the impact you think it can have and conclude with what they can do to help make this possible. - Use pace, pitch and tone to drive it home
You can use pace to purposefully slow down when you want to emphasise a point or let something sink in and speed up in between. The same applies to varying the sound and tone of your voice — this keeps your audience alert and interested and the more you practise, the more naturally it will come.
Build empathy
Let’s focus for a bit on the part where you’re explaining the problem to your audience — this is your best opportunity to build empathy. You have the privilege of being the voice of the customer, so walk your audience a mile in their shoes.
Show others the problem, don’t just tell them. Use photos/screenshots to document the steps a customer support agent has to go through to resolve various queries. If they have to use a spreadsheet to find answers because they don’t have a database, show this spreadsheet. If they have to manually move queries they can’t answer by filling out a type form, show the flow. If their team lead spends an hour each morning organising new tickets, show them an example.
We have to remember, that at the end of the day we’re human and we sympathise with other humans. It’s easy to not take a problem seriously when it’s vague and un-relatable but people respond to real stories. People also respond to data. So use it to really sell how painful the existing process it — find out how long it takes for most queries to get resolved, how much time is spent organising tickets, how often the google sheet breaks because of over-use, how many agents work on support and how much it costs us to train new ones. And use all of this to tell their story.
Speak from experience
It sounds like you need to know an awful lot about about a problem before you can talk about it — right? Well… not exactly. If you think you need to be a complete knowledge expert on a problem before you can start solving for it, you might never start. They key is to start by finding all the existing knowledge experts and work with them to map out their space: shadow a few of the support staff for a day, ask them what they struggle with, speak to the team lead, get data on how many tickets we get and how long it takes to resolve each.
You should always keep growing your knowledge but starting high up will make sure you see the whole picture early on and will give you a view of where you need to go deeper. Building your experience with a problem in this way will make you a more confident speaker.
The more you know, the simpler you can explain it.
There are some people who are really good at ‘winging it’ and can seem confident even when they know so little about what they’re talking about. But for a lot of people, speaking in front of an audience is nerve-wrecking. I know that I fumble less when I know what I’m talking about — confidence comes more naturally when I know that I’ve asked the right questions and spoken to the right people.
As a PM, you speak on behalf of so many teams so when you represent their combined knowledge well and tie it all together, you’re playing such a vital role.
Your voice is your brand.
Which brings me to my final point — your voice is your brand. The reason why communication is such an important strength for a PM is because you are that linking pin and all the work you do with different teams to solve a problem isn’t seen unless you make it visible.
Every time you send an email on behalf of the team, give updates, demo progress, share new insights, raise blockers/red flags, measure impact, you’re speaking on behalf of all the people contributing to the success of the product. So make people remember what you say. Think about who your audience is each time, purposefully draw their attention to what is important, keep them hooked by building on their empathy and obsess over the problem you’re solving. Because it’s often not just about what you’re saying but how you’re saying it.
