Story+PD: what the team is up to

Part of a series at the intersection of Storytelling and Product Development. Originally posted in April 2024 on LinkedIn.

Story is everywhere in product development. It’s either being told deliberately or inferred and interpreted by people who expected to hear one. And it can be told well, or poorly. Even in mundane, logistical project management contexts. We might not think of product reviews or process checks as concerned with anything but, “Are we on time and under budget?” 

But the metrics in a project management review don’t tell the whole story. How you present matters. The narrative you deliver of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and our status and progress change how people look at the numbers and the whole endeavor. 

Speaking of reviews, quarterly or annual strategic reviews often give time for the team to prepare and a pro forma so your team’s slides can go into a larger report. The story is constrained, but it still has to be there. Do you have a narrative of progress? Or a collection of tasks completed? Is it dominated by what fate did to us, or by what we did as agents of our fate? Are we adding stress of uncertainty or creating confidence grounded in truth? 

A headline or a series of headlines needs to tell the story for you, not just label your slides. This concise storytelling shouldn’t wait for the big meeting, however. When an executive or client sponsor makes a visit, a spot inspection could happen. Or an elevator encounter. Be ready. Have your story whittled down to its essence, its arc, and its core challenge to overcome, so that The Ask for your sponsor is clear and they can feel they’re not part of a chaotic mess.   

A friend of mine experienced the downside of this when his innovation team was placed under new leadership. The executive who inherited the department came to review the team’s work, which was future-oriented and adjacent/complementary to the core. Despite preparing days ahead with a room of impressive visuals of what they were working on, they weren’t able to tell a clear and compelling story of why it was so important. And he bluntly told them so. Not long after the team was disbanded and these potential growth avenues were cut short. They might have been making great strides toward their innovation vision, but the story wasn’t clear.

This is related to, but different than, your story of How Our Team is Doing, which we’ll look at in another post.