The Giving Tree. The Lorax. The Little Mermaid. It’s safe to say, good stories such as these stay with us for a lifetime. They burrow into our subconscious and we can often remember tiny details with stark clarity decades after we first learn them.
Why are stories so impactful? They invoke empathy and enthrall us. We identify with the characters, and they invite us to go on a ride. They also give meaningful context to sterile facts and make abstract ideas feel more human.
For these reasons, in business, storytelling is a critical skill for roles that involve sharing information — because good stories stick. They are also persuasive and powerful.
Storytelling is essential in product management at Parsyl, a Denver-based cargo insurance tech company. Except, in a product roadmap’s stories, Ariel isn’t the main character — the customer is.
According to Senior Product Manager Marika Garcia, her team uses stories all the time to get stakeholders to rally around the customer experience. Creating this kind of alignment is a major obstacle for product managers, who spend a lot of time shepherding cross-functional teams toward a unified goal. Garcia finds that impactful storytelling helps cut through the noise and convey what’s important while keeping the customer in focus.
“A compelling story has a protagonist who is the customer. Telling their story helps teams empathize and understand why an item is on the roadmap,” said Garcia, pointing to a recent situation in which a developer stepped in enthusiastically to explain to a customer success rep how a function would change in the near future. “When a developer becomes a narrator, you know the story is powerful,” she said.
When a developer becomes a narrator, you know the story is powerful.
Stories help communicate the motivations for a roadmap, which is essential to garnering support from the team.
Jennifer Stefanacci, head of product at Denver-based PAIRIN, agrees. “Understanding where the features came from and the ‘why’ behind prioritization really helps,” she said.
Stefanacci pairs this approach with an objective prioritization framework to get teams aligned as they build out an integrated workforce platform for government, education and workforce development organizations.
Built In Colorado talked to these two local product managers for more practical advice about how to create alignment from the beginning of a project, and how to maintain it even when the journey takes an unexpected turn.
Parsyl is cargo insurance technology company.
How do you ensure there’s alignment across teams from the outset when developing a product roadmap?
As a product manager, you are selling the product vision to internal teams to get buy-in on the roadmap. At Parsyl we do this by telling and retelling the story about what you are building, for whom and why.
We interview cross-functional stakeholders as part of discovery which gives them a heads up on problems we are looking to solve and is a chance for us to collect their feedback early on. We use Notion to document our research, user testing and validation of the hypothesis. This page is particularly helpful for the developer and quality assurance teams who will be building the solution, but is shared with all internal teams for alignment. For releases targeting certain customer segments, we’ll include those teams in design review so they have a chance to ask questions.
Having the background and sharing the customer’s story helps to gain buy-in on roadmaps. At the beginning of each quarter we review the roadmap with different teams in the company. Sharing at this scale gives teams an opportunity to speak up and ask questions in small group settings.
We sell the product vision by telling and retelling the story about what we are building, for whom and why.
How did you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle?
At the end of every sprint we have a demo showing development progress. We introduce each feature by reminding teams of the story behind a feature and what problem we are solving. We send regular product updates through Slack and communicate recent releases, what the teams are working on now, next and later and include discovery and design as statuses. We use ProductBoard and have a roadmap view for the customer success and marketing teams and we review with them every other week. This helps us to identify rollout needs and communicate roadmap changes. Finally, we share statuses and updates in our quarterly all-hands meetings. We make hardware and software so the product-development lifecycle has additional complexities.
On a recent hardware project, we ran into delays with certification we needed to obtain. So when release timelines needed to shift we communicated that in emails, allowing teams to communicate concerns and impact, which gave us buy-in from those teams.
When we were dealing with unknowns that could change weekly or daily, we’d send emails to teams so we can have conversations about how that impacts customer go-live dates and planned expansions.
Did the project needs change during the development process? And if so, how did you re-prioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?
Initially we were going to roll out a hardware device with a defined list of functionality, but after validation with cross-functional customer facing teams, we decided to release with a shorter list that focused on key use cases with existing customers. This allowed us to expedite the rollout and get the product into the field sooner. We made sure to communicate what part of the story had changed and the impact on the roadmap. We also identified that we would need to empower our customer success team with the tools to adequately support the rollout of a new product.
We started developing what we thought would be an internal tool and realized it would be beneficial for customers. That meant needing hi-fi designs that conformed to our customer web UI. Communicating frequently and retelling a story about why we are building a particular solution has helped to get teams onboard.
Recently, a customer success rep brought up frustration about a feature of our software. Before I could respond, a developer enthusiastically replied about how that will improve in the near future and how that will benefit the customer. When a developer becomes a narrator, you know the story is powerful.
PAIRIN is an edtech and social enterprise company.
How do you ensure there’s alignment across teams from the outset when developing a product roadmap?
Before you even begin developing a roadmap, you must create an objective framework for prioritization in order to avoid having loud opinions or issues that seem urgent sway the conversation. That way, you know you are making decisions based on your company values and goals. We have built a framework of six factors — from revenue to social impact — to determine priorities and help guide the cadence of our roadmap.
How did you maintain that alignment throughout the development cycle?
Having good communication upfront is critical. That way, when something new comes along, it is easy to discuss the trade-offs of any changes or new features that we want to include. We make it very clear that if we add something new, something else will have to give.
We make it very clear that if we add something new, something else will have to give.
Did the project needs change during the development process? And if so, how did you re-prioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?
Always. Especially working on large, government projects, there is just no way to know all of the details up front. I try to make sure that the engineering team doesn’t have to switch gears once they start a sprint, but up until that point, making changes is fair game.
