The product truth well told: An exercise in storytelling

This article derives from a presentation given at the Masters of Product Marketing event in October 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.

Hello, my fellow product marketer! I’m Pedro Bojikian, and I’m super pumped to share my storytelling advice with you. I consider storytelling a big force in my career as a PMM. I love to take the stage to deliver product demos or talk about our product vision – always with a passion and curiosity for storytelling.

I’m going to share some thoughts on how I approach storytelling, but before we begin, I want to let you know that I based today’s case study on Shawn Achor’s TED Talk, ‘The happy secret to better work’.

If you haven’t watched it yet, please do; you’ll get much more value out of this article. Plus, it’s really funny.

My favorite storytelling books were also a huge inspiration for this article.

• Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate by Brian McDonald
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff
• The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind by Jonah Berger
• Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr
• The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

I’ll only get into the first three today, but I highly recommend that you go and read them all.

A lot of people read these books, and a lot of people read articles like this one. However, reading is not enough. In my experience, the PMMs who excel at storytelling are the ones who keep these books close. They’re constantly consulting them, rereading them, and applying what they learn every day.

It’s a constant exercise. With time, you’ll find the frameworks you like the most for different situations until, eventually, you create your own framework that borrows a little from each. That’s when the magic happens.

Let’s get started.