Why Tech Storytelling Matters
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Last week, I had a chance to meet up with two former colleagues who were visiting their company HQ in Raleigh. We met up at the new Food Hall in downtown, had some drinks, talked about life and work. Eventually the topic turned to engineering, technology vendors, and storytelling.
They relayed a story of enduring a recent all-day training session. The presenter had immediately launched in to a series of menus, steps, templates, jumping back and forth between multiple platforms. My friends lamented that the goal of the product, or even the goal of that days training, was lost due to an unclear story.
I realized that I had done the same thing that very evening. When we started talking about work, I demoed for them our wizard new mobile UI, and talked about our predictive analytics. But I never told them about our purpose at First.io - to help real estate agents win more business. I circled back and explained that; thankfully, they were very forgiving.
It’s amazingly easy to come up with a tech idea. If you have access to the right people and resources, it can be easy to build. But none of that matters if you can’t tell the story of why it matters. People are relational creatures, and stories are our way of providing context and generating excitement!
What could go wrong? #
If your teams are already making progress on building the product, storytelling might seem like a luxury that nobody needs.
- Lack of team focus: If the team doesn’t understand what they’re building towards, then all work becomes an endless to-do list with no end in sight.
- Lack of internal interest: It takes a company to build a product, but more brains means more chances for confusion.
- Loss of customer interest or trust: In the story my friends told about vendor training, they lost trust because the trainer could not articulate the main point of their product.
Where do I start? #
Storytelling is, unfortunately, a skill not taught in most code schools. General presentation skills are learned in university, but generally far from the context of technology. Many experienced business-side folks with decent storytelling chops often lack the technical expertise to tell the right story.
I’d like to share a few strategies that shaped my storytelling skills.
- Always start with an audience: “Who am I talking to?”, “Whose attention am I trying to gain?”, and “Why should they care?” should be the first questions. My goal was always to tell the story to capture the attention of the least-interested person in the room (usually a manager who had no technical expertise or interest in back-end development). If you can draw in that one person, the rest will usually follow.
- Have a main point: Keep the main thing the main thing. One of the most derailing moments in a story is when the storyteller stops to introduce other points they just remember, but seem vastly out-of-context. When something comes to mind that you think you should mention, just stick with your main point instead. Details can always be clarified later.
- Practice! One of the best ways to stick to your main point is to practice beforehand. When those small details come to mind mid-sentence of your practice run, go ahead and finish, then try again. This gives you practice in delegating spontaneous thoughts, and helps refine they way you make your point.
Don’t expect good storytelling to happen overnight. Treat it like a scrum project, not waterfall. Experiment, see what works, then iterate.
Not everyone on your team has to be great at storytelling, but don’t neglect it. Your team needs at least one or two experienced storytellers.
Good luck!
Feel free to connect with me!
- www.linkedin.com/in/jeremiah-coleman-product
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- jeremiah.coleman@daasnerds.com
- https://github.com/colemanja91