PB 17/05: Storytelling? that's some serious sh*t..
Don't be seduced. You should *always* let the facts get in the way of a good story
First a word from our sponsor (me!)
I’m very actively building up my coaching and consulting practice. I’m committed to helping individuals, teams and businesses get better results from better product management. If you’re interested. Find out more here; book a free 30 min call to discuss; or just reply to this email and get in touch.
If you read any description of what’s expected of a senior product leader (here’s one picked at random) ‘storytelling’ normally features in the list
And there’s something in this. The ability to take a potentially random program of activity and/or information about customers and craft it into a narrative that can motivate teams and various stakeholders, is a handy skill to have.
And you know, Steve Jobs was a great storyteller… (more of him later).
‘Storytelling is our superpower’
As humans, we love stories. Like sex, shopping, chocolate and MDMA, stories increase the level of dopamine in the brain.
If you want to go bigger and further back, Yoval Noah Harari, author of the (utterly awesome) Sapiens says that ‘storytelling is our superpower’ and basically it was the birth of storytelling 70,000 years ago that allowed us to evolve.
‘A human tribe with a good story was the most powerful thing in the world,’ he wrote earlier this year.
But it’s because storytelling is so powerful, so dopamine-inducing and so seductive, that it can often go against the grain of good product management and good decision making. It can impact your judgement as much as any drug.
The cautionary tale of ‘Feature A’
As I’ve been starting to coach, I’ve been reflecting on some of my past professional mistakes (the strapline: ‘I’ve made a load of mistakes, so you don’t have to’ is probably a little too self-deprecating…but accurate).
I spotted a really strong pattern of things where either myself, or a whole team, had followed a course of action that aligned with a great story, and ignored facts that were screaming at me to do exactly the opposite.
To paraphrase Mark Twain and that common critique of my early career or journalism ‘I didn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story’.
Here’s an example - let’s call this Feature A. I won’t say where and when, partly to protect the innocent, but also by doing so, it might also be more relatable. And upfront, I should say this was 100% my fault.
Feature A started as a prototype from one of our engineers - it was very cool…it fitted with what we were trying to do as a company in terms of brand and reputation; and similar businesses to us in other countries had something similar (but ours was better of course).
My boss loved it. The CEO loved it. The PR, marketing and sales teams loved it. We were going to build it - it became part of our internal ‘story’. Not just part of our roadmap - but part of our ‘strategy’!
As we did our discovery (which happened after everyone falling in love with it) three things became clear.
The customers it was aimed at liked it; but user testing, simple number crunching, and my personal past experience told us usage was going to be low
It was going to be more complex and expensive to build than we initially thought
The cost of ownership - mainly because of the impact on future test cycles- looked ugly.
Still ‘the story’ was great. And by now changing the story internally would be like saying our strategy was wrong.
After a massive slog, we launched it. It got a lovely bit of PR, was very marketable - and it became part of our external ‘story’, but usage was at almost exactly the low level our guestimates predicted.
The ‘cost of ownership’ thing was a killer. This stuck with us for years and slowed us down. Should we kill it? Well, yes, but that was a big effort and it would have meant changing our external story….and what would that say about our decision making, or ‘strategic thinking’ (ie: our internal story).
And so it sat there…an unloved testament to the power of ‘storytelling’
There have been a lot of feature ‘A’s out there! Lots of things where the story was great, but once you pick away at the tempting narrative the data is screaming at you ‘for the love of God, do not do this!’. And yet we persist. Sometimes clinging to the rationale that this is ‘strategic’ (ie of little measurable value, but it sounds good).
We would all like to think we are cool and rational beings, and we would never make a mistake like Feature A, but the temptation to tell a good story, and to deliver on it, is so so strong.
Even Steve Jobs fell for a good story
Smarter people than any of us have fallen for good product stories. Take the product that Steve Jobs said was ‘as significant as the personal computer’; Jeff Bezos described as ‘revolutionary’ and attracted a ton of investment from John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins (yes, Mr OKRs..).
That product was The Segway - which had an incredible ‘story’. I mean who doesn’t want to revolutionise transport and save the planet? But….really, was it ever going to?
Lots of very big, very bad business decisions started as great stories, told via dense powerpoint decks, supported with lots of lovely charts and illustrations.
Think of some of the shocking mergers and acquisitions, in which hundreds of very smart people paid each other millions, as they fell in love with a story about how 1 + 1 is going to equal 3, when the reality is that it would end up at 0.5.
In fact, when you look at recent business history, you wonder why storytelling’s stock keeps rising as a skill we should ,master, when there’s lots of evidence that storytelling in business is a massive red flag.
Sam Bankman-Fried, told a great story about how FTX was a force for good. Elizabeth Holmes crafted a wonderful narrative about Theranos’s ability to test for countless ilnesses from a similar drop of blood. Both have become stories themselves - for all the wrong reasons. Similarly, the countless scammers who are now the subject of countless podcasts: all purveyors of great stories.
They want to seduce you..
The point is that stories make us drop our rational defences. As Princeton Professor Peter Brooks has warned: ‘Stories have designs on you. They want to seduce you.’
The danger is that trying to force a narrative can lead us to over simplify, to see patterns and connections where they don’t exist, and to see powerful data that disproves our point as an outlier, when it’s actually the story.
And, if I can say this without getting too insanely meta, the very story that storytelling is a good thing for being a leader, is in itself ‘a great story’.
The idea that being able to craft a narrative is a way to get ahead and demonstrate your leadership (product or other) prowess is a much more exciting ‘story’ than the fact that you need to methodically sift through evidence and systematically crush great sounding ideas in favour of often much more dull activities that stand a much better chance of success.
Rather like the little boy in the Emperor’s new clothes, all too often behind every ‘great story teller’ there is someone who actually knows what’s happening, who can point out a well thought through and data-backed reason why the narrative is in fact utter fiction.
But in business, unlike in the fairy tales, their point of view can all gets swept over by the sheer momentum of the story they’re trying to debunk.
So. yes - storytelling is a skill, but it’s also one to use very carefully. And, in our own humble little world of product management we should always, always let the truth get in the way of a good story.