Creating alignment and enthusiasm as a product manager
How and why should we improve our storytelling?
In this article, I want to highlight why product managers must keep working on their storytelling skills. I’ll show you how focusing on empathy, brevity, and honesty can improve your narratives. This will help you drive alignment, inspire enthusiasm, and deliver better products.
This article was a talk in its previous life. If you’d rather watch it or listen to it, HERE it is as part of a past Globant Tech Insider session.
I’ll start by asserting that the key responsibility of product managers (PdMs) is to create and own the vision for their product. One of our main goals as PdMs is to achieve company-wide alignment around our vision and to generate enthusiasm for it. Because building a product involves so many people, it’s impossible to succeed without alignment and enthusiasm.
As PdMs, we don’t always make the biggest business or strategic decisions. Executives, C-levels, boards, and committees often handle these. We also aren’t the ones doing sales, writing code, building infrastructure, or designing automated test suites. Still, we are in touch with everyone doing the above jobs and help feed their decisions. This, in turn, shapes the future of the product and the company. Our primary tool for this is communication.
Even though communication is the most important skill of product managers, many of us rarely invest conscious effort into improving our speech and writing.
It’s worth asking ourselves why don’t PdMs focus on improving communication skills. One key reason is our belief that it’s already one of our strengths. Landing any product or management role usually requires strong storytelling abilities. If you excel in this role, you’ve likely received positive feedback about how you communicate. Improving weaker areas is important, but it’s also valuable to enhance your strengths. Further strengthening your strong suit can speed up your growth.
In the beginning, I mentioned three key aspects I want to explore to help improve your communication. I’ll start by giving away my main takeaway: to create enthusiasm, you must be emphatic, concise, and honest. Let me rephrase that in a way you’re much more likely to remember:
You should tell a true story that is relevant to your listeners.
Storytelling is not only a bedtime activity between a parent and their children. It’s needed in many roles we play, and as a PdM, we practice it with different audiences, from engineers to business executives. We engage in storytelling through various mediums. We speak with others face to face or in video conferences. We write emails, direct messages, functional documentation, and product specifications. There’s a good reason the tasks we define for our teams are called user stories.
You need to adapt your message to your audience
Creating alignment doesn’t mean you must make everyone’s end goal the same. To deliver a product, you’ll need to work with people from different parts of your organization and likely people outside it. They all have goals and responsibilities, giving them unique motivations and interests. Each of them will contribute to your product differently based on their role, expertise, and understanding of the domain.
The story you tell each person or group should speak to them in particular, and you should cast them into key roles so they are immersed. Your story should make them understand why fulfilling the product vision is a good step for them toward achieving their own unique end goal. It should speak to their motivation. This is how you get people to care, and this is how you get people enthusiastic. You need people to align about what needs to be done, but they don’t need to have the same reasons and expectations.
Always consider the impact of people’s role on their availability and attention span. You’ll often have to summarize a quarter’s worth of work or a year-long plan in a few sentences, which can be frustrating. View it as a challenge rather than a nuisance. Different decision-makers operate at different levels of detail. Your vision may have enough details to fill a whole book, but it competes for attention with many other stories. Instead of feeling cheated that you only have 30 minutes to talk with your CEO, appreciate the multitude of briefings they handle daily. Empathize by imagining yourself in their shoes, and carefully select what to say and ask during your meeting. It’s your job to determine the unnecessary details you can omit. Plan out your story in advance instead of improvising, especially when you don’t have much time to tell it.
Let me give you two questions to ask yourself whenever you’re ready to send a two-page email or Slack message:
Did my similar messages get the results I wanted? Did I receive meaningful questions?
If your messages often seem to go unread or rarely get challenged, odds are you over-communicate, and people have started ignoring you. A shorter message takes less time and focus to read, making it easier to understand and remember.
It’s often worth leaving out non-essential details for the sake of improving clarity. This can be risky sometimes; people have a bad habit of filling in gaps with their own unvalidated assumptions, so make the key information clear. But it’s wise to leave room for questions. It can make people think about what they need to ask, help them share their assumptions or concerns, and it can improve your entire plan by spawning meaningful conversation.
All that said, don’t forget tone matters: you work with people, not only machines. You can add a joke, an emoji, a word, a sentence, a meme, a paragraph, whatever helps create the appropriate tone to match the context. People care more about stories when they feel a connection with the storyteller.
If you need to bend the truth, you need to reevaluate
I’ve saved the most important topic for last. True stories always have the highest impact. I believe that you can’t solve problems by avoiding the truth. Any short-term benefits you might get will be canceled by the price you pay down the line — and this is without even considering this story's moral, ethical, and legal side.
To keep ourselves in the mindset of a PdM, imagine you found a problem, planned a solution, and your team shipped an MVP. The feedback was positive, and everything was going the way you expected. But later on, it became clear that the early signs were misleading. It’s a natural human urge to try and save face instead of owning up to failure. The same sensation appears when you’re preparing a presentation, and most of your metrics look brilliant, but one or two are downright poor. You might feel like focusing on the successes and writing off the rest as irrelevant or out of your control.
There’s a good chance that the biggest opportunities and the most important lessons to learn are hidden in the parts you don’t want to mention in your story.
Don’t distort the truth because you feel ashamed to admit failure or because others pressure you to hide negative results. You gain more respect as an individual by maintaining your integrity, and you inspire your team more as a leader by owning your mistakes. You’ll find the most important clues about how you can improve your product by asking yourself where you were wrong and why. This is so important that I’ll repeat the chapter title. Whenever you feel like you need to bend the truth, take a step back and reevaluate.
What should you avoid to make your messages clear?
The devil is often in the details, so let’s look at some specific things to avoid when crafting your messages.
- Poor grammar is a leading cause of misunderstandings. We live in a world of constant hurry. We’re surrounded by short messages, half sentences with missing punctuation, and incorrectly used words. Paying attention to proper grammar is one of the cheapest ways to reduce the back-and-forth between you and your audience.
- Lack of structure makes your story hard to follow. Give the same level of attention to your stories as UX designers give to their designs. Stories must have an introduction, a middle, and a conclusion. They must have the correct hierarchy of information, be easy to scan, and have a good flow.
- Nested sentences are easier to avoid in writing, but planning can help reduce them when speaking as well. Try to keep away from tangents in your line of thought. Avoid dashes and parentheses, and in general, don’t interrupt yourself. When you end a sentence, everyone should still remember where it started.
- Uncertain language is tempting because you can try to avoid commitment by using expressions such as “should be”, “could be”, “in theory”, etc. There’s always going to be uncertainty in any project. It’s your job as a PdM to know what is clear and what is not. Talk in certain terms whenever possible, and call out if something is unclear. Even better, try to plan what you will do to eliminate the uncertainty and share your plan when asked about the subject.
- Jargon and abbreviations are often just a way to tell the in-group from the outsiders. Confusing people is not worth the ego boost. Avoid jargon or abbreviations, especially in documentation, as you don’t know who will read it in the future. Remember that people might not ask what something means to avoid feeling dumb, which can harm efficiency.
- Repetition can have its use, but try to avoid it as a rule of thumb when documenting processes or decisions. Try to have a single source of truth for anything important, and cite the source wherever relevant instead of repeating it.
Then again, repetition is beneficial when you want to ensure that your audience internalizes an important message. So allow me to repeat the key takeaway:
You should tell a true story that is relevant to your listeners.
Closing thoughts
I want to wrap up this article with one of my all-time favorite quotes from my biggest mentor when it comes to storytelling:
We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.
George Carlin
Part of me thinks I wrote this article so that I’d have an excuse to spread the above quote to as many people as possible. I jokingly call many of Carlin’s quotes “verses from the gospel according to George”; that’s how much I value his work. This statement inspires me every day. I remember it so well because it’s a concise, true message that I first heard in the middle of a masterfully crafted story George told in one of his comedy specials.
Let’s pay more attention to how we communicate, whether with our teams, leaders, or users. The products we’ll create together will be better; odds are, we’ll enjoy building them more.
