Swimming with the Current of Stories

Storytelling differentiates the average Product Managers from the awesome Product Managers. Storytelling will make your product stand out, because it will make your audience identify with you or your product. And that is the marketer’s ultimate dream: to get potential clients to make an emotional investment into their product or service.

What makes a story great?

In the book Made to Stick, the author provides three core elements of a good story:

• Great stories are simple. They make it simple for the reader to understand the core message. The key to simplicity is to prioritize the most important elements and use something relatable for the user as an analogy.
• Great stories have inherent conflict. They have some inherent conflict that grips the reader’s emotions.
• Great stories have a hero. The hero brings change to the world. Change is most compelling when the reader can see himself/herself as the hero.

If you break these elements down further, you will see the following framework.

• There is a status quo that is about to enter a point of disruption
• Conflict enters in at some level which one can see as problem or challenge
• The next step is to resolve the conflict.
• Finally, describe the people, product or process that were vital to solving the conflict.

When giving a product presentation, or any presentation for that matter, it is important to keep this structure in mind. To some, “storytelling” may sound flippant and superficial, something “not serious”. But in reality, it is the most serious thing you can do in a presentation. Indeed, it is the core (this conflict-resolution tension) of any great talk. That’s because humans have been telling stories for 10s of thousands of years. It is simply the way homo-sapiens have learned to listen to information, and it is also a powerful aid to memory. In other words, the story structure has been part of our cognitive development for almost as long as humans have been on this planet.


One does not need to look at history and learning psychology to see the significance of stories. We can also look at ourselves. Because the most important stories are the ones we tell ourselves. Why do we exist? What is our mission in life? What change do we want to bring in the world? What are the obstacles that stand in our way of achieving that mission? Why does it matter to us personally? What are the two or three incidents during your life that have gotten you to where you are? And when we are not telling stories to ourselves, we entertain ourselves daily by listening to or reading the stories of others – even if some of these stories are made up (fiction). They come in the form of films, TV series, novels, and theater,

So when presenting a product or service - it is important to know that your audience is already primed to hear stories. Like food, people need to hear them every day. They are themselves structured to do so. So rather than go against that psychological current, it is much better – and easier for everyone – to swim with it.

Where to learn

At the International Presentation Academy, we offer a 2-day Storytelling Workshop in Munich (Germany) that will guide you step-by-step in the skill of developing a story for your product or service presentation - or for senior managers and team leaders who need to inspire their colleagues. We will show you how to use the story-structure, as well as help you with content. We also offer a Storytelling Workshop in English – Munich (Germany) and Storytelling Coaching in Munich (or online). For more information, contact us at [email protected]