What Story Will Your Product Tell?
Product managers are story tellers. I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense; I mean they are messengers, communicating much more important information than anything about the entity they think of as their product. Because most companies, these days, are predominantly characterised by their on line, digital presence, rather than the décor of their stores or the friendliness of their sales assistants, the product itself conveys a lot more about a company’s beliefs, values, ethics and morals than almost anything else. Indeed, some customers have no other experience of a company other than through its on line presence and the products it makes. They don’t come into contact with anything else.
The organisation’s view of humanity, how they regard the people that buy or use their products and the kind of future they believe in are all spelled out explicitly in the products, platform and digital presence they present. If your company is founded on bad faith, for example, then the product will virtually scream that you regard your users as fodder, to be covertly exploited for gain, without concern for their well-being. Think about business models that seem to offer something valuable for free, but which are, in reality, selling personal data, identities and preferences, harvested surreptitiously from users, for no purpose greater than to fill their corporate bank accounts. The platform now no longer says, “we want to give you this valuable gift for free”, and says instead, “you’re gullible and weak, fit for exploitation. Lucky for us. Too bad for you.” If you’re proud of being a disruptor, who are you disrupting and why is it good for them? Is it good for them at all?
When you adopt AI or machine learning in your platform or product, does your decision paint a picture of a bright future for a thriving planet, or does it say that tomorrow will be a veritable dystopia, where your organisation, uniquely, has the monopoly advantage and everybody else is enslaved? Are you simply using your technological investment to suppress the majority opinion? Do you even care what the majority wants? Does your efficiency algorithm, used to monitor and nudge your workforce to meet and exceed its targets, say that you’re giving your employees more trust, psychological safety, agency and autonomy, or that you are taking it away from them? What story does your work communicate? Does it value diversity, learning and initiative, or commoditise it away?
If you don’t have a clear story to tell, or you obfuscate, or try to disguise the real story with what you think is a more palatable one, consumers can sense that acutely. The product vision you are trying to convey will not be compelling. Instead, it will be distrusted and your organisation (and your own) reputation tarnished. Reputations are hard to restore.
They say that global influencers and entrepreneurs use stories to start movements, but what kind of a movement is it and is it even worth starting? Who benefits? Are you starting this movement to help everyone else, or just to help yourself? Why is what you want good for everyone? Sadly, most of the influencers and entrepreneurs that start movements don’t really give a second thought to the well-being of everybody else — it’s not a priority for them. You can tell, because if it were, they would ask more questions of ordinary people, rather than imposing their vision on the planet.
If you have an imaginative story that inspires, enlightens, empowers, encourages and edifies, then by all means tell it. If it moves people to feel differently than they did before, in a positive way, they’ll share your story, but they’ll also share a story that dupes them, making them inadvertently complicitous in spreading a contagion with destructive qualities. It’s too easy to misuse story telling and abuse those you’re telling your story to. You have a responsibility to play fairly.
Telling the story of your product well requires that it be personal and that you make yourself vulnerable. You need to be open and honest. There are, unfortunately, people that can fake this, too. They tell their story in an exploitative way, cynically manipulating their personal experiences and history to garner sympathy or get people on side. Their vulnerability is a thin veneer, masking something altogether more calculating.
People don’t buy for logical reasons, they buy for emotional reasons. Emotional stories are magnetic. It’s all too easy to whip up a storm of reactionary emotions, through the story you tell, so if you are going to appeal to emotional responses, make sure they’re at least authentic. Manipulating people’s emotions cynically, for your own purposes, is a bad decision that will ultimately catch up with you.
Actors and singers that ultimately make it put their authentic emotions into every performance. If they try to fake it, they look like hams. Even if they’re not feeling a particular emotion in the moment, they have to dredge up a real memory of it and re-experience it, to convey their performance convincingly. As a product manager, if you are a zealot for your product, then you really need to be sold on it, not just going through the motions. You should avoid trying to pass off any product that doesn’t genuinely reach you. Half-hearted evangelism is not a good look.
A good story is unforgettable. Product managers can use this to their advantage because if the story is truly unforgettable, you won’t have to struggle to remember it. You can wax lyrical, off the cuff, for hours, if necessary, because the story is packed with easy-to-access meaning. Conversely, somebody struggling to articulate their product or platform’s benefits and virtues, or the job it does, who is resorting hesitatingly to written notes, doesn’t really believe in their product. They’re working too hard to retell what ought to be something coming from their heart.
If an audience hears a good product story, which inspires them, that’s unforgettable too. You won’t have to spend so much time and energy on marketing. They’ll have taken the story of your offering to heart. They’ll want to join your movement willingly and spread the word unprompted. It goes viral. These products tend to sell themselves, because the story they tell is something people are willing to retell and they tell it accurately, because its unforgettable. Who doesn’t want to work on products that are unforgettable (for the right reasons)? The flip side is that a product can rapidly become notorious. That’s an unforgettable story that propagates too.
Organisations that offer platforms have to be very clear about their story. If you can’t communicate the story of your platform succinctly, collaboration with partners will be less effective and marketing fuzzy and indistinct. You’ll struggle to build a critical mass of partners and users. As an ecosystem, it won’t thrive. The story is built right into the DNA of your platform and if it isn’t compelling, nobody will care enough to use it.
Find a story about your product that resonates, then go tell it. Everything else will flow from this.
About the author
Michael Topic is a freelance Product Manager with over thirty years experience delivering products that didn’t exist before. He welcomes contract enquiries to define new, competitive products, design them and deliver them. His speciality is software-based products.
Disclaimer
The opinions offered in this article are intended to describe common scenarios that sometimes occur in general product management practice. They are in no way intended to be read as referring to any particular employer, past or present.
