JJ Rorie
- 1 min read

Communication in Product Management - The Importance of Stories & Persuasion

Episode 017: Nils Davis

"But people are actually emotional creatures. 10% doesn't actually excite them that much. They'd much rather hear about the lion or tiger that's lurking in the woods that's going to kill them or something like that. Well, in modern world, what is the equivalent of that? Well, it might be, I don't want to get fired, I don't want to look like an idiot to my boss, or I want to get a promotion. So then you start to think of what are the stories behind the reasons..."

Episode Transcript

JJ: Hello and welcome to Product Voices. Good communication is such a bedrock of everything we do in product management, from our relationships with our internal stakeholders to our customer communications, our go to market strategy, everything is impacted by communication.

So today's episode is all about communication and what that means for us in product management. I've got a very special guest with me today. Nils Davis is senior product manager at Trinet, the author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook, an experienced product management coaching consultant, and the host of Secrets of Product Management podcast. Nils, thank you for joining me.

NILS: JJ, I'm so happy to be here on Product Voices. I'm really excited.

Yes, I have been on your podcast, so now I am thrilled to have you on Product Voices.

So you're now very good at communication and how you handle all things communication. Obviously, you understand very keenly the role it plays in product management, but none of us really start as experts, or at least most of us do not.

So tell me a little bit about how you learned communication, what happened in your career to kind of make you realize that this was in an area you need to focus on and learn more about?

NILS: Well, so it's a little bit of a long story, but let me try to summarize it. Back in the 2000s seems like a long time ago now. I worked on a product called Accept 360. It was a product for product managers, and it was very good. It was very powerful. I misusing it every day today, but the product itself failed, couldn't sell enough. Our customers loved it. And as product managers, as the listeners know, we need something to help us. It would be great to have a tool that was dedicated to us and knew what we had to do and helped us solve our problems.

The first thing that I figured out was what is actually the business value of even having a tool that does what Accept 360 did. And that was where really my blog started. It started with what's the business value of product management? And then it went on from there. And I thought, well, okay, that's great. But I also feel like simply telling somebody that they're going to get a improvement in something that's not that compelling, you know, and I started to think about how you. Persuasion depends on appealing to the emotions of the people you're talking to, not just their rational brain. Right. So talking about a 10% improvement in something, that's a rational brain thing. If you're making a decision totally rationally, then that should be enough to convince you. Right. Impact on the revenue of a company.

Because product managers are responsible for five to $10 million of revenue, typically, if you look at the ratios in an enterprise software company anyway. And so if you make the product managers 10% better at doing their job, that's going to reflect in half a million to a million dollars of additional revenue.

And of course, if you're just improving the work of one person who then has all this influence throughout the rest of the company, then most of that revenue goes to the bottom line. So it can really crank up your profits if you do it well. But we didn't tell that story.

And are those symptoms things like, well, I might lose my job if I can't get better at this, or my company is going to go out of business because our competitors are going to eat our lunch because they're doing a better job. Right. So you start to think about those things, and as you do that, you then start to think about, well, what can I promise with my tool? Or what do my customers actually experience when they use Accept 360? Are they reversing that? Are they getting better? Do they have stories they can tell about how they used to suffer in this way and now they're not suffering anymore? Now this is all retrospectively, of course. Right. I'm looking at how. I might have gone about go to market with my old product that I didn't. And then I started to think about, well, these are all questions that apply to people doing products today, including myself.

Of course, one of the key things that I learned in this process and this wasn't even that long ago was a really easy and basic but very fundamental story structure that let me put all this stuff into a framework that I could then easily teach, easily use myself that I could use to work with sales and marketing people that I could use when I was doing customer discovery that I could use for motivating my developers. So it has this power. It's very simple, but it has this power to do all kinds of things in terms of improving what I do as a product manager and what other product managers people listen to my podcast now know how to do and things like that.

JJ: So tell me a little bit about that story structure.

NILS: Well, it's pretty simple. And what's interesting about it, and this was accidental, and I'm not even forcing this duality at all. It's very much like what we do as product managers, right. If you think about product management, what we do is there are three main things. I would say three main things. We find market problems that are worth solving. So we go out and do market discovery, customer discovery, whatever you call it. We talk to people about their problems and about the impacts those problems are having on them. And then we figure out which of those we should solve. And we then talk to our developers and we say, okay, here's the problem. Let's create a solution to that problem. Right?

So that's typically the biggest quantity of work that we do is working with the developers to create the solution. But it doesn't matter how well we do that work if we haven't found a problem that we're solving. And then the third thing that we do is we take that solution to market and we help sales and marketing find the right people that have the problem because we've talked to the market and we know the characteristics of the people that have the problem. We know their personas or the market segment that we should attack. We know the stories of their pain. And once we have successful customers, we know the stories of how the customer experience the transformation. All of those are fantastic tools for sales.

So that's what we do as product managers, find market problems, create solutions, take the solutions to market. Well, this fundamental story structure is really similar to that. There's a problem that's worth solving at the beginning of a story. The middle of the story is about the search for the solution to that problem. And if it's a customer story, the very last thing that happens in that search is they find us. And then the end of the story is the transformation that the person, the lead character of the story has had as a result of this great solution. And now in the case of a customer success story, the problem is all the things that the customer or the prospect was suffering from before they found our solution. Now they may have tried to solve that with another product by building their own solution, by using a spreadsheet, something like that.

If you're in enterprise software, typically a spreadsheet is in the mix there, but they failed and they're still continuing to have that problem. That's the middle of the story. And then the end of the story is they found our solution, and now they've had this transformation. And what is the transformation? Well, it needs to be emotionally engaging. It needs to be like, oh, I got a promotion, I got a raise. I got recognized for saving the company, or it could even be great job finding that solution. Everybody's a lot happier now or another one I always love to do is it used to take me I used to have to work late every night to get these reports out. And now the reports are all automated. And so I can get home and see my kids baseball game.

So the structure of the story, very similar to the product management basic product management framework. Is there's a significant problem we're solving that has emotional resonance? Right. I might lose my job if this problem doesn't get solved. There's a search for a solution and then there's a transformation at the end. So problem solution transformation. Really simple formula.

JJ: Yeah. But it makes a big impact. We've tapped into emotions, we've made it relevant to them. We've told it in a story form, which we all know is more engaging. Let's talk a little bit about the story and again, tapping into things that matter to them. Obviously, that's a very important vehicle to get it to what we ultimately want to do with our customers, which is persuade them and influence them to move to where we would like them to go. Right. Hopefully we've done all the work upfront to solve a real problem, and we're not just doing this as a means to get only what we want. Hopefully we're actually solving their problem and it's a good thing for them, but we still need to persuade them to understand it and influence their thinking and their movement and their actions.

So let's talk a little bit more about that. In addition to, again, tapping into their emotions, telling stories that matter to them, how do you persuade? How do you tap into that important capability of persuasion in product management?

NILS: It all is fundamentally related to the story thing, right. One of the challenges. And I see this all the time when I look at clients or just anybody out there. If I go to their website and I look at their customer success stories, the customer success stories, you usually don't have the emotional components of the problem that the the customer was having before they got the solution. It hardly ever says, the customer success story hardly ever says, well, our company was going to go out of business if we didn't solve this problem or I was about to get fired. Those are the good ones. If you can find those, that's a good sign.

Part of what you need to do in order to do the persuasion is you need to be able to find the pieces of the story that are really emotionally compelling and you use them in various different places. So if you're thinking about the sales funnel and there's lots of different parts of the sales funnel, but to get people into the top of your sales funnel, to get prospects and qualified leads, you use the part of the story about the suffering that the prospect is probably having right now. And you might do that by having a little customer success story that's like, hey, I used to have this problem and our company almost went out of business, but I found X and now I'm the CEO, whatever the story might be.

So that's got that whole little bit of it's got all the little pieces of the story. And then that's going to help people say qualified prospects are going to be able to say, oh, I have exactly that problem, or I have a problem that's very similar to that. Or I feel the same way about my stupid situation. And so that's going to make me into in looking at this product more. So then you get people into the funnel, and then you move them through the funnel again with a lot of story related things. So for example, when you're going to do discovery with this prospect, when you're going to have that first sales call and find out, OK, tell me about what your real problem is and how it's impacting you and what you're suffering.

And of course, all prospects think that they're unique, but they're all really not unique. We know that. But you ask them the question and they say, well, I'm having this problem, this problem, this problem. And you might drill down on it because the salesperson knows the stories and knows the emotional things that happened. The salesperson can say, well, how does that make you feel? Or I have a customer that had that exact same situation and that person was feeling really down or was about to lose their job. Does that resonate with you? Right.

So you're using it to create an emotional connection between the prospect and the salesperson. And of course, our solution at that point. So that's the thing you might do in doing discovery. Then when you're demoing your product, if you have a product that you demo and I'm talking really I talk mostly about enterprise software. And so there are salespeople and demos and things like that. If you are working on different kinds of products, these might be different the way you use these things. But during the demo, you want the sales engineer to refer to the customer's problems that they talked about in discovery and say, well, instead of just saying, well, let me show you how our product does X, you say, let me show you how our product would solve your problem based on how we've solved the same problem for other customers.

Or you mentioned in discovery that this is a big issue for you. Would you like me to show you how our product addresses that issue? Right. And again, that is a thing where you're using story to help them feel like, oh, these people are going to take care of me. In fact, one of the things that I always think about with storytelling and with persuasion is a lot of what I'm doing is trying to take care of. The audience is subconscious, whether the audience is the prospect or if I'm presenting to a group, the audience is the audience, or if I'm trying to persuade developers to do something, they have a subconscious as well. They're human beings. We sometimes forget that. So what does the subconscious want? Well, the subconscious wants to avoid danger, and it wants to feel like it's being taken care of. And that's oversimplification, of course. But basically you want to avoid things that make the audience's subconscious feel like it's threatened. There's lots of different ways you can mess that up. And then you want to make the subconscious feel like it's being taken care of, because that makes you a trustworthy guide in the process of getting through life.

And so, just as a quick aside, some of the things that can cause their audience's subconscious to react to you badly is things like Typos on your slides, depending on the person. But like me, if I see a Typo on somebody's slide, I immediately think, particularly if I see more than one or grammatical errors or whatever, I immediately think, this person I can't trust anything this person says. And that's an irrational response. It's subconscious. It's irrational. I maybe can totally trust what they say, and they're just not good at spelling and grammar, but it kind of raises my hackles, so to speak. And that puts me off that person in. And so that's bad for persuasion, because what I want that person to do is not have that response to what I'm presenting. I call that grooming, basically making sure that you groomed yourself and your presentation and the things you say enough that you're not going to raise the hackles. Now you may want to raise the hackles in some particular situations, but you don't want to do it accidentally.

So how do you take care of somebody? Well, in the persuasion process, you take care of somebody by showing that you understand them. Right. That's the reason we use the story about the successful customer having overcome the same problem, because that makes us sound like, oh, we understand that person's. That prospects problems, and we've solved it before. So not only do we understand it, but we're potentially a person that can guide this person out of the woods. There's another aspect of being the guide, which is also to communicate just what is the process going to be and what is the road look like, what are the obstacles and potential roadblocks and how are we going to get over those? And if you do a good job of guiding the process, expect through that process, whether it's actually just within the sales presentation.

We're going to talk about this, we're going to talk about that, or if it's about, say, the onboarding process of the product, you're going to face this issue and here's how you're going to address it. And by the way, here's a customer story to validate that what I just told you is true. Right. So thinking about managing the subconscious is a big part of all of this. And it's one of the reasons stories are super powerful. Another place where you use stories is objection handling. So in the sales process, the prospect may say, well, you don't have Feature X. Your competitor does. We really want Feature X.

And so the salesperson can say, yeah, you know that's. We hear that a lot. Let me tell you a story about one of our customers who had the exact same feeling as you. They were really opposed to our product because of not having Feature X. Well, they went with us anyway, and now they say, I don't miss Feature X at all. And instead I got this Feature Y, which turns out to be much better. Whatever the story is, you need the story, obviously, to be able to do that. But that's another way that you use stories in that sales process. And of course, those are all aspects of persuasion, right. I want to keep the customer moving down or the prospect moving down my funnel. And if I'm talking to a bunch of execs about funding my new project, that's another persuasion topic. Right. I'm going to do something similar. I'm going to say. If you're talking to some execs about funding a project like a new feature, a new module for your product, then you want to tell them the story about how the prospects are currently suffering because they don't have a good solution to this. And then you talk about how you can build that solution and you need to be reducing their sense of risk the whole time and anticipating their objections.

And so that's where you're going to again, you're going to use a story specifically to talk about the prospects problems. That's a story. It's a tragedy. Until they find your solution, the prospects have a tragedy. Once they find your solution, it becomes a happy ending story. And so you are going to be using stories in that kind of situation as well.

Another example of using that kind of story is when you're talking to your debts about a module that you want them to build. Right? I don't say build this feature for me. I say, hey, our customers or a segment of the market that we want to tree address they're suffering in this way. And we have the opportunity to solve this because it aligns with our business and whatever it's. But I'm going to tell them the sad story of those prospects and their suffering. And I do that for a couple of reasons. One is if developers understand the reason for doing something, they're going to be more motivated. This is just a fundamental truth about motivation of people. They want to have a purpose. It helps motivate them. If they really understand the problem, they're likely to ask better questions of me about what the solution should look like. They're also likely to come up with better solutions just in general.

So if I have motivated them well, which means that they pay more attention to the problem, they pay more attention to building the solution correctly. Maybe they do it faster and they're doing a better job of they're creating a better solution because they understand the problem at a deeper level. That's going to be the module will be better because of those things, it might go to market faster. And that is one of the ways that as a product manager, I create more revenue is by getting my devs to build something faster that's better. And I can do that with persuasion, using stories.

JJ: Right. I love that. And I think one of the really important aspects of what you are saying is that we need different stories. Or at least variations of stories for our different constituents. You've got users, you've got executives, you've got buyers, you've got our internal stakeholders and you've got the various target segments. So different groups within our customer base. And I think each of those to your point, you need to tap into different emotions or different aspects.

And a good example that I've seen recently, and my colleague Bruce actually brought this up one time recently as we were teaching our class at Johns Hopkins, the Apple Watch, and they've got this new commercial where there's basically a person in the woods and they've fallen or they've had an accident or something. And the Apple Watch actually alerts authorities or someone that there's an emergency without the person having to do anything. And so my colleague Bruce was telling the class and telling me that his wife has always said, Bruce has had an Apple Watch for a long time. And his wife has always said, I don't want one of those stupid watches. I don't need one of those watches. And Bruce used it for fitness or just whatever he used it for. Right. And those things did not resonate with his wife. Well, she sees the commercial of the safety aspect, the tapping into that particular emotion, and she goes out and buys an Apple Watch the next week.

NILS: Oh, my.

JJ: Right, yeah. And so again, these things are dynamic. Right. So Apple Watch has been out there a long time. Obviously, it's always had some level of safety feature. They've found that there's this new market that they can kind of play that up and enhance the feature itself, but then position and tell that story.

And so I think in any type of business. Right. Whether it's be to be enterprise software, consumer gadgets, whatever, we're constantly looking for those market segments and what's going to resonate with them, because then we've got a position and tell those stories.

NILS: Right, exactly. Yeah. I think Apple is a really good example of storytelling and failing to tell stories. So that's obviously a fantastic storytelling. So on the iPhone marketing, they often switch back and forth between telling stories and not telling stories on the ads. So, for example, shot on iPhone, that series, every one of those pictures, there's a story behind it. And they don't even tell you the story. But you look at the picture and you say, oh, that's a person that must be in an interesting place, otherwise they wouldn't have taken that picture. I wonder what that's story is. Right. They don't even have to tell the story for there to be a story and for it to engage somebody who's looking. And then sometimes they have the ads where it's a beauty picture of the phone.

And I don't know if you noticed, but iPhone sales go up and down, and I believe that they go up and down in relation to whether they're using a shot on iPhone type of ad or a beauty picture type of ad. Fascinating. If you look at the beauty picture, the beauty picture ads, you can't tell that they're not Samsung phones, they're just a phone. But the shot on iPhone ad clearly is not Samsung. I saw another really great series of ads. Google just had a bunch of great ads for their latest Pixel, and they've changed them. Unfortunately, I don't think they took enough advantage of this, honestly. They have this feature that essentially their camera system takes better pictures of people of color. And they had a bunch of ads that were kind of implying that they might have been able to be more forward with their claims there. But I thought that was a really interesting series of ads, and that's like, yeah, that's getting to a real pain. There's a lot of people who can't get good pictures of themselves and their families with iPhones. And Google says, we've solved that for you. Yeah. So I thought that was very interesting. I just happened to basically once I started noticing iPhone ad, iPhone billboards, it's a lot of billboards that I see on my drive up to San Francisco. When I go up there, I started to recognize that some of those were stories. And once you learn the story structure, it's pretty interesting. You can look at a Billboard and you can say, is there a story there or is there not a story there? And 90% of the time there is not. And you look at that Billboard and you say that Billboard is not working for me. I don't think I would buy anything because of that Billboard, and that's why there's no story there.

JJ: Yeah. So that's interesting. My next question for you and you've touched on it. I think kind of implementing and embracing that story structure is one way that folks can get started. I kind of like the idea of just looking at ads and seeing if it resonates with you and really doing some audit of things that are around us every time, kind of every day, to see if it resonates with us and what we would do differently if we were the product managers of whatever product we're looking at. I think that's probably a good way to get started, too.

But my question to you is, how do you advise folks to they understand the importance of storytelling and the persuasion and influence that comes along with it. They understand that communication is important, but they also know that they have some gaps personally, and they need to improve upon this. How do you coach and advise folks to improve their communication and storytelling skills?

NILS: Well, the first thing I do is I always teach this structure, and it sounds easy, but the structure itself is easy. What's hard about the structure is that it requires you asking specific kinds of questions. Like if you're doing a customer, if you're doing a customer success story interview with a customer, oftentimes we shy away because we're technical people. We like facts and data and numbers and things like that. We shy away from those emotionally laden questions like, how did that make you feel? Or are you going to lose your job because of this or what was going to happen to the company if you didn't solve this problem? Right.

So the things that really get to the emotionally gripping parts of and if you have a successful customer, it's okay to ask those because you're going to find out at the end, at least when you tell your story, you're only going to use the negative things that were transformed by the product or whatever. So you want to ask that, and then you also want to ask the other flip side of the questions. Okay, so now you've got our product. Did you get a promotion? Did you get recognition? Did you get a raise? How has your life changed? And when you start to ask those questions, it's pretty amazing what you hear. It's like I did a customer success interview once for a client and. They said that after this guy had done work with them, they had gone from being considered to be nobody and kind of useless in the company.

This organization that did agile transformation to being considered the experts in the people that went. And they were the group that people went to when they needed to make a transformation. Right. This was a consulting engagement, not a product per se. But after that consulting engagement, they went from being sort of nobodies to being celebrated and treated as experts. And that's the type of thing you'd really need to ask those questions to get at the root of those things. Otherwise you won't be able to tell them in your story.

So a lot of what I teach people is how to ask those questions just to be very straightforward about it. And I even have a cheat sheet for that. You can download my cheat sheet on how to ask those questions and the questions to ask. And if you do that, your customer stories will get a lot better. I also teach a few other structural things. So I talked about the basic structure of problem solution transformation.

But there are some other things you can learn. And I've learned this from movies, basically. And one of them is the vertical take off or it's also known technically in media res, meaning start in the action. The vertical takeoff and start in the action are both like, just don't do any set up, just start in the pain. And so, for example, I sometimes tell a story about something that I did for one of my companies and it's with our sales were tanking. That's pretty grabby.

JJ: Oops.

NILS: Obviously, I wouldn't start with that if I couldn't say at the end. And then we had three consecutive quarters of beating quota because you have to be able to tie the bad thing that happened as part of the problem into whatever something in the transformation. So that's just some examples of how I work with people.

JJ: Yeah, that's great.

NILS: Product managers are often not that good at this, but with some training they can get a lot better.

JJ: Right. And we're going to link to your cheat sheet, your website and podcast on Product Voices.com. So we'll have all of that so folks can gravitate to your resources.

What other resources. This is my final question for you. So obviously, you yourself are a resource and have done a lot of great things. And again, we'll link to all of that. So listeners you can find Nils’ cheat sheets and resources and all of his good assets that he has created. But Nils, what other folks and tools and assets have you used over the course of your career to learn about this area.

NILS: Well, I have a few things that I always recommend. One of them is, well, Kathy Sierra has been a great influence on me. So she's somebody that a lot of people don't know about. She had a she was the publisher of the Headfirst Java books. This was back in the late nineties and early two thousands. And she had a fantastic blog called Creating Passionate Users, and she was unfortunately harassed off the internet, which is a terrible story, but you can still go the blog is still there. So she stopped writing it in 2006. But it's full of amazing things. And so I often recommend that. I always recommend a video of a talk she did at the Business of Software conference in 2014. I think it was it might have been 2013. In fact, I have a keyboard shortcut that types out the URL to that video because I recommend it so often. So those are some things we can put links to those in the show notes as well.

I feel like Chip and Dan Heath's book Decisive is a fantastic book for product managers. One of the things that we have to do, in addition to telling stories, is we have to prioritize and we have to make decisions. In fact, a big part of our job is just decide. It doesn't even matter what the decision is. In fact, you can learn all about that exact thing in that book called Decisive. And then if you have harder decisions, it also will give you a lot of insights into how to make better decisions, how to make decisions that aren't clouded by your panic or by someone else's panic, and how to get over the situation where the highest paid person's opinion is what always wins. So lots of things like that. So I always recommend Decisive. I think this fantastic book. That just ties directly into what we do as product managers.

I don't actually have a specific product management book to recommend. I think there's a lot of good ones out there. I tend to look more at books that are more general business books that have had a lot of influence on me. Another one that, of course, huge amount of influence is Crossing the Chasm. The main thing I've taken away or one of the big things I've taken away from crossing the chasm is the value proposition template that Geoffrey Moore talks about in that book, which is essentially the boiling down of the thing that you did as a product manager. Find a market problem, create a solution, take it to market, which is who is this product for? What does it do? Why is it better than the alternatives? If you can answer those questions, you're going to be a lot further along in your go to market. Obviously, if you can answer those with customer success stories, even better. So those are just a few off the top of my head. I have a blog post and a podcast episode that recommend a bunch of books. Those are worth reading. I believe that your new book is going to be very much worth reading as well.

JJ: Thank you. I hope so. I appreciate that shout out.

Nils, this has been a tremendous conversation. By the way. Thank you for all of those resources. We will link to all of them so listeners can't go to ProductVoices.com and then access Nils resources and all of the other books and things that he talked about.

Nils, thank you so much for joining me. I loved our conversation.

NILS: It's been delightful, JJ. Thank you for letting me go on and on about it.

JJ: Oh, no, I love it. I love it. It's tremendously valuable. So thank you all for joining us on Product Voices. Hope to see you on the next episode.

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Communication in Product Management - The Importance of Stories & Persuasion

Episode 017: Nils Davis

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