The Secret Storytelling Techniques of Top Product Managers!
How Crafting Compelling Narratives Can Transform Products into Cultural Icons
It was a vibrant evening in São Paulo, Brazil, during the early days of ClickSitter in 2015, when I first grasped the profound impact of storytelling in product management. I was in the midst of introducing our new app, designed to revolutionize how parents find trusted babysitters, to a small group of potential users. Despite the app's innovative features and sleek interface, there was a palpable sense of detachment.
As the presentation concluded and the attendees began to disperse, one particularly engaged parent stayed back to offer her thoughts. "It's a practical app," she acknowledged. "But what really drives it? What's the story behind it that makes it resonate with parents like me on a deeper, emotional level?"
Her words struck a chord. In our laser focus on features and design, we had neglected the fundamental truth that people don't just buy products - they buy into the stories and meanings those products represent. It was a hard-learned lesson that would forever shape my approach to product management.
Later that year, I stumbled across the writings of Yuval Noah Harari, the brilliant Israeli historian and thinker. Harari's critical insight? What truly distinguishes our species is not our opposable thumbs or large brains but rather our unique ability to believe in and propagate fictional stories, myths, and abstract constructs that don't exist in objective reality. From nations to companies to social institutions, these "imagined orders" allow us to cooperate flexibly on a massive scale. Harari says:
"We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. In addition to the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions, there is a second reality of myths, fictions, and illusions."
This struck me as profoundly relevant to the world of product management. Because, at the end of the day, the products we help bring into existence are manifestations of the human ability to collectively imagine new realities into being. They reflect our shared myths, narratives, and aspirations - our "fictions" in the non-pejorative sense. A smartphone, for example, isn't just a handheld computer; it represents personal empowerment, global connectivity, efficiency, and access to limitless knowledge encapsulated in a sleek, pocketable form. The stories we tell and buy into around products aren't separate from those products; they are central and indispensable.
Our Modern-Day Myths
As someone who has spent over a decade helping shepherd new digital products to market, I can attest that the most successful ones are those that tap into - or shape for themselves - resonant cultural narratives. They don't merely solve problems or optimize workflows but speak to our most fundamental desires and motivations as human beings.
Take the original iPod. Well before its iconic scroll wheel and minimalist design, the first spark was a simple but powerful narrative: 1,000 songs in your pocket. It was a modern myth that captured our yearning for autonomy, our thirst for comprehensive catalogs of knowledge and content at our fingertips, and our fetishization of compact, totemic devices. By framing the iPod's core proposition in such a crisp yet deeply evocative narrative, Apple set the stage for it to become a cultural icon far beyond just a well-designed MP3 player.
Coming up with the right core narrative for a product is only half the battle, though. As a product manager, you then have to work relentlessly to reinforce and amplify that narrative through every facet of the user experience, the branding, the go-to-market strategy, and the ongoing audience engagement. When Steve Jobs unveiled those iconic silhouetted dancers grooving to their iPods in the "Silhouette" ad campaign, he cemented the iPod's positioning as a sleek vehicle for physical liberation and youthful self-expression.
So, how do you find those resonant product narratives that tap into society's "imagined orders" and spur mass adoption? It starts with a deep study of human culture and psychology. At one company, we allocated a budget to bring in an anthropologist to present the latest research on millennial subcultures before greenlighting a new photo-sharing app targeted at that demo. Of course, it was audacious and unconventional - but products that manage to strike chords at a civilizational, almost mythic level require peeling back multiple layers.
In my experience, the most potent product narratives often stem from one or more of the fundamental human drives that transcend cultural and temporal boundaries. These core drives are the foundation upon which all other motivations are built. According to various researchers, there are only two primary drives that govern human behavior:
The pursuit of love, passion, and
The avoidance of pain.
These two core drives give rise to various secondary motivations essential to understanding human behavior. For instance, the quest for:
Mastery, knowledge, and self-actualization can be seen as a manifestation of the love and passion drive,
While the desire for status and influence may be rooted in avoiding pain.
Similarly, the need for belonging and forming social bonds, asserting individuality and self-expression, fulfilling roles and responsibilities, seeking pleasure and joy, and imbuing actions with meaning and purpose can all be viewed as subcategories of these two primary drives.
Over the past two decades, many successful digital products and services have centered on narratives that tap into these fundamental human motivations. For example, Wikipedia's mission to "democratize knowledge" speaks to the drive for mastery and self-actualization.
At the same time, Facebook's concept of "forming self-curated digital neighborhoods" resonates with the need for belonging and social connection. Tinder, among other dating apps, has capitalized on the desire to eliminate loneliness and find meaningful connections.
As a product manager, my role involves identifying how to leverage these archetypal and eternal human desires in a way that aligns compellingly with a product's functionality, ultimately creating a narrative that resonates with users.
The Narrative-Product Flywheel
Of course, we can't rely solely on focus groups and user research to guide our narrative framing decisions. That kind of data mainly reveals stated preferences and self-reported motivations - but the aspects of human behavior and decision-making that often matter most for product adoption come pre-packaged into our cultural subconscious.
This is where you see the uncanny power of great entrepreneurs: their ability to intuit zeitgeist-capturing product narratives through a keen ethnographic sense and prescient vision and to adroitly shape perception and buy-in without the benefit of formal data. Steve Jobs was legendary for this ability, almost supernaturally attuned to looming cultural desires even before they bubbled into mainstream recognition - whether it was the confessional yet self-expressive appeal that would catalyze the blogosphere or later the smartphone as a bionic extension of our very consciousness.
What's beautiful about compelling product narratives is that they often become self-fulfilling prophecies. As users buy into the narrative around a product or service and incorporate it into their daily rituals, their perceptions confirm and reinforce the narrative's core meanings and implications.
In the early days of Twitter, I was skeptical of its practicality. However, my perspective shifted dramatically during an unexpected ordeal in 2008. I found myself at the airport in Belo Horizonte, intending to return to São Paulo, where I resided. A sudden, torrential tropical downpour unleashed chaos, leading to the closure of the airport and the cancellation of my homeward flight. To make matters worse, it was the last flight of the day, and the airline refused to cover the cost of an unplanned hotel stay.
Frustrated and stranded, I turned to Twitter, unleashing a series of exasperated tweets about my situation. Remarkably, a childhood friend, now an employee at the airline, noticed my online rant. Despite the years and distance that separated us, he reached out and managed to arrange accommodations for me. It was a moment of serendipity that not only solved my immediate dilemma but also demonstrated the unexpected power of social media to connect and aid us in times of need.
Suddenly, Twitter's founding narrative - of a running real-time dialogue connecting you to what was happening right now - crystallized in an almost spiritual way. No longer an abstraction, it became a lived reality and personal truth hard-baked into my psyche. From then on, my perceptions and habits with Twitter flowed directly from that narrative of Twitter as a virtual global consciousness where you could tune into the human experience in real-time.
These kinds of narrative-reinforcing personal epiphanies and rituals among users are what really lock in a product's meaning and identity - helping it take on the iconic aura of an "imagined order." Whether driven by visionary entrepreneurs like Jobs or arising organically from the bottom-up, this narrative-product fusion is at the crux of what allows digital platforms to transcend their technical underpinnings and become massively scaled social institutions and cultural forces.
These kinds of narrative-reinforcing personal epiphanies and rituals among users are what really lock in a product's meaning and identity - helping it take on the iconic aura of an "imagined order." This narrative-product fusion, whether driven by visionary entrepreneurs or arising organically, is at the crux of what allows digital platforms to transcend their technical roots and become massively scaled social institutions and cultural forces. After all, compelling product narratives often become self-fulfilling prophecies that reshape behaviors and mindsets.
Telling Is Believing
This dynamic of narratives shaping our collective perceptions and realities is why even ostensibly innovation-resistant corporate behemoths have realized the importance of crafting resonant, archetypal stories to usher in major technological shifts, enlisting product managers as chief storytellers.
As electric vehicles gain a toehold in the mass market, for example, automakers have smartly framed the transition not just around factors like sustainability or government incentives. Instead, they've leaned into classic narratives that speak to the soul of the driving experience: Tesla casts its EVs as bold ambassadors of the future era of hyperconnected autonomy and transport-as-a-service; Ford invokes romantic notions of reinvented American muscle with the electric Mustang Mach-E; and Rivian sells its rugged EVs as vehicles for kicking carbon anchors and reclaiming our primordial bond with unsullied nature.
The underlying technology may be radically innovative, but the core product narratives being spun expertly tap into our oldest, most primeval mythologies around power, freedom, tribalism, and humankind's complex relationship with the natural world. And that's precisely what allows us to perceive upstart electric vehicles not just as niche personal transportation devices but as avatars for sweeping cultural transformations in progress.
We've seen this same principle at work for other disruptive technologies. When I helped launch an AI writing assistant a few years ago, we initially faced skepticism that such a product could represent an existential threat to knowledge work and human creativity. To overcome this, we framed the AI not as a replacement but as an "augmented intelligence" - an omniscient digital muse that could elevate and enhance the creative process by amplifying our uniquely human capacities for imagination, emotion, and self-expression.
By positioning the AI writing tool this way, we converted initial doubts into enthusiasm for this new human-machine symbiosis. While tech ethnographers might dismiss such messaging as "marketing spin," Harari reminds us that societal stories and myths often precede and shape objective technological realities, not the other way around.
I can personally attest to this dynamic. Despite initial trepidation about AI's encroachment into my domain, my perspective quickly shifted once I started using the writing assistant hands-on. Instead of feeling threatened, I found AI to be a powerful complementary force.
This virtual muse could instantly synthesize volumes of information into novel conceptual frameworks, which I could then weave into richer narratives through my own linguistic talents. It was like our minds had fused into a higher-bandwidth creative channel. In those revelatory moments of human-AI co-authorship, I felt I was midwifing a new mythology around the virtues of our synthetic team membership.
Belief as Superpower
Sitting here in 2024, it's more apparent than ever that the most transformative innovations in product and tech all follow a strikingly similar trajectory: first, an imaginative vision and core narrative take shape; second, that story-driven prototype helps materialize new tools and behaviors; and finally, at scale, it shapes societal beliefs and norms in a continually self-reinforcing cycle.
Bill Gates realized decades ago that in the modern world, popular belief and perception are industrial forces as potent as any novel scientific breakthrough or paradigm shift. Sure, Microsoft leveraged genuine technical wizardry to launch its industry-dominating "Wintel" personal computing platform in the 1980s and 90s. But that was the easy part. More impressive was the parallel, more subtle revolution Microsoft helped foment through sheer narrative might and evangelism: convincing society that a PC should be a ubiquitous personal necessity worth several months' salary. It was a self-fulfilling fiction that was so powerful that it radically reshaped the economics and social order.
Any great product manager worth their salt will tell you that a vital part of the job is acting as an ambassador, storyteller, and mythmaker. Simply building an elegant, optimized solution is table stakes; the real challenge is weaving that narrative magic to propel your product into the collective imagination until it attains an aura of inevitability and permanence. To adapt another famous Harari quote: As product people, we "Revise the fictions by which we perceive our reality and let our behavior be regulated."
So look at the inflection points that have reshaped modern technology, culture, and society over the past few decades: the rise of PCs as indispensable household utilities; the internet catalyzing new virtual civilizations; the smartphone transfiguring into a cyborg extension of our beings; blockchain minting novel conceptions of trust and truth; gene-editing rewriting the ancient codes of life itself. Invariably, the seeds for these world-historical upheavals sprouted first as stories, as new myths to reshape our collective fictions and behaviors. The most important work was done not in the lab or code repository but in cultivating archetypal narratives that tapped into humanity's primal ambitions and desires.
We product managers are a unique creative caste - equal parts technologist, psychologist, cultural commentator, and bard. Our imagined orders and invented realities may be humble in genesis, but they attain civilizational import at scale. When Harari talks about our species' Sapiens superpowers - our cognitive capacity to collectively spin myths and perceive intersubjective fictions - he's describing the core of what we do. The products we unleash, and stories we weave may be confined to silicon, code, and glass. Still, their ramifications play out across timelines and dimensions far vaster than we can ever perceive from our present vantage point.
So yeah, sweating the user flows, metrics, and roadmaps are essential. But always keep sight of the deeper magic inherent to our craft. We are the modern mythmakers, the scribes engineering tomorrow's culture and collective realities. What sublimer power could there be than that?