JJ Rorie
- 1 min read

Storytelling in Product Management

Episode 027

Colleen Graneto: "...the story taking on a life of its own. That's a great way to measure. Yeah, if it's starting to take a life of its own, if you see, if you start hearing that story back, then that starts to be good signal that it's something that you've done well. And if not, if it's falling flat, if people aren't engaging, you don't see excitement, I think then that gives you signal that you might need to continue working to improve it."

Episode Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

story, storytelling, airbnb, terms, product, customer, important, creating, host, communication, communicate, resources, colleen, team, building, learned, visuals, people, thinking, work

Intro 00:03

Welcome to Product Voices, a podcast where we share valuable insights and useful resources. To help us all be great in product management. Visit the show's website to access the resources discussed on the show, find more information on our fabulous guests, or to submit your product management question to be answered on our special q&a episodes. That's all at productvoices.com. And be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform. Now, here's our host, JJ Rorie, CEO of Great Product Management.

JJ 00:37

Hello, and welcome to Product Voices. There are really few things more important in product management than communication. Product is an inherently cross-functional discipline. So there's constantly communication going on amongst the product team and the product ecosystem about all aspects of the product, the customer, the market, the work streams that are going on in the organization. Effective communication is really a bedrock to success in our world. One aspect of communication and connecting with audiences is storytelling. Storytelling is a really powerful tool and a product managers toolbox.

JJ 01:13

So today's episode is all about storytelling and how product managers and product teams can use storytelling to improve communication and connection. My guest is Colleen Graneto, Product Manager at Airbnb. She's worked with B2B and B2C products over the last 15 years including the last six in Airbnb, giving her a unique understanding of what is necessary to launch products that resonate with users. Colleen also teaches and coaches at both General Assembly and UC Berkeley Executive Education, sharing her experience in building strong product and business strategy, storytelling and decision making. Colleen, thank you so much for joining me.

Colleen 01:49

Of course, looking forward to our chat today.

JJ 01:53

Let's start with the basics. I mean, why is storytelling so important to good products?

Colleen 02:00

It really boils down to all the things that you said in the intro in terms of the importance of communication, and storytelling just becomes a really great tool to get the message across. But beyond being a communication tool, I think it also really forces the team to focus on the customer and brings that customer centricity into the product, into meetings into decision making. Because when a story is told really well, it forces that attention on the customer. So I would argue that's another added benefit of really using storytelling is bringing in that focus on the customer.

Colleen 02:36

And the second piece is it also is inspiration, it creates motivation for the team. It helps build a stronger sense of purpose within the team, which we all know is really important when we build really highly effective and highly performing teams, to have strong inspiration and motivation. And having that really strong story for why we exist. What we're trying to achieve, how this will help our customers creates that motivation and brings that purpose to the team, which can really help the team gel and work together more effectively. So I think those three things, and we'll dive into a lot more in terms of how this can be a communication tool. But I think, you know, that communication itself, but also the customer centricity and inspiration are really, really important. When we think about bringing storytelling into product. Yeah, I think

JJ 03:23

That's really a great point. We so often, it's never intentional, but we so often get so mired in the detail of the solution work and the, you know, the ongoing workstreams of creating something for the customer, that we actually sometimes forget to center ourselves on the customer. And so I think that's a really great mechanism, right to bring that customer back and tell their story again, and to your point, which I love, then that inspires us all. There's nothing that burns us out more when it's tedious work, and we kind of forget the why behind it. So that you know, products hard, so it's not going to be rosy every day. But if we can, if we can instill that, that inspiration and that customer why I think it's gonna make a big difference. So I love that.

JJ 04:10

Let's talk a little bit more about the communication. Tell me a little bit more about that. And kind of some of the details about how we can use storytelling and how we can really communicate kind of the insights to the rest of the product team and then externally as well, but especially kind of building on that theme of you know, centering ourselves on the customer and inspiring our team.

Colleen 04:38

Yeah, and I think that hits on, you know, if we're going to break down the communication that a product manager needs to do, I think it breaks down into three different things. One is they need to share the stories of the customer. They need to share the insights that as a product manager, you need to share the insights that you get from research from all of the different data analysis you know, The qualitative and quantitative analysis that you're doing, you need to be able to synthesize and share that information so that it permeates the organization. So that's one really important piece.

Colleen 05:10

The second piece is getting alignment into your decisions, which is essentially your strategy. So how do you get buy in on your strategy? And how do you expand your influence and align these other teams that you might need to collaborate to your work. And when we look at that communication as well, you know, storytelling can really help with that.

Colleen 05:29

And we look at the third and you kind of hit on this. It's the external communication, in terms of getting your community excited about what you did, and how it's going to help them and actually making sure that that message is clear. And so when we look at those elements of you know, what a product manager needs to do in terms of communication, it might be a slightly different story that we're telling at each piece of the puzzle there. But collectively, it should pull together into a cohesive story. And, you know, the product manager isn't necessarily doing any of this alone, especially, you know, external, we working with marketing, sales and other teams. And internally, when we're synthesizing insights, we're working with research and design, and data science and other teams and functions internally, as well.

Colleen 06:14

But I think the core capability that product can bring to the table is that ability to bring it together to a really clear, concise story and keep it cohesive across all of these channels. And, you know, like you said, it's really easy to get lost in the actual product work. And sometimes forget the why. And I think this forces you to take a step back and really bring the why into everything. I've had this happen in my career, where it's like, you know, we know, we need to understand the impact. And so we spent a lot of time, you know, quantifying and communicating the impact. But it's easy to forget that it's not just numbers, and we need to bring the human element into it and the story about why we exist and how this is going to impact our customers beyond just the numbers. And that's where storytelling can really bring the numbers to life. Yeah,

JJ 07:02

I love that bring the numbers to life, that's a really important part, I always say the data is important, but it's the story behind the data, right? It's, it's nobody, nobody really cares about the numbers, they care about what it means and the story behind it. Right.

JJ 07:14

I also love what you said about kind of, on the external side, the it's, it's marketing and selling. And, and there's, I'm sure everyone listening has an experience of building what we believed was a great product, but we couldn't quite tell the story. Right. And, and matters, you know, if someone doesn't understand what it's going to do for that for them, it doesn't really matter if the product could help them if we can't tell that story. I also believe and I've seen probably the the best product managers I've worked with have been what I've always kind of coined internal marketers, they were really good at getting those teammates on on on board by keeping them excited.

JJ 08:01

So let's turn our attention to more details of a good product narrative, like what makes a really good product narrative.

Colleen 08:10

Yes, we touched on this a little bit, and I want to zero into some of the details to give folks some ideas to take away, one of the most important things is telling it through the eyes of the customer. And you kind of see this in terms of what the customers are struggling with, why they have these motivations, these goals. And then what what this could potentially do. So it's very much experiential, and told through the eyes of the customer. think another thing that's really important, is we want it to be big and inspirational. We don't want it to be something that just feels potentially really ordinary or small. Because we remember a part of this is the motivation and inspiration for the team giving us a shared purpose. And if it's something we can achieve really easily. Does it serve that that role as much, this is a little bit more hitting on what you said about great product managers being great internal marketers, in terms of that ability to get people excited, and tell really good stories and get people activated to want to join and help pursue the story and pursue this effort. So having those big inspirational stories, I do think helps. We obviously don't want it to be so far fetched. And so you know, out there that we can't see it actually coming true. But you know, it's there's, there's a balance there.

Colleen 09:31

And we talked about this as well that the really great story can bring the data alive. But we need that data. And we need those examples that are relevant to the point of the story. woven in. A lot of times where I see stories struggle is we might have done a really great job of creating something big and inspirational. We've, you know, woven in the customer very well, but it's not grounded in data and actual examples. So then it's just a perspective. It's an opinion And that's where there's, it's really, really important to have those specific examples. So specific insights, that specific data that supports this narrative that we're sharing. And there's a lot that's very similar in storytelling to movies, when we think about movies, and entertainment. It's all based on stories. And I think there's a lot there in terms of formulas for really good stories that we can incorporate into our product narratives as well.

Colleen 10:28

And it's a lot about this hero's journey, which I touched on a little bit when we talked about the eyes of the customer in terms of the current situation, the conflict, and then getting to the resolution, or, quote, the happy ending. And I'll definitely share some more resources on this as we talk about it. But there's a lot to be learned from looking at really strong stories, through movies and other entertainment channels, and thinking about how we can apply those frameworks and formulas as well to how we communicate about our products and the problems we're solving for our customers.

Colleen 11:01

So boiling it down, it's we want to really put it in through the eyes of the customer. We want them to be big and inspirational, we want to make sure we weave in the right insights and data. And think about the right structure. There are structures that we all are just acclimated to, as well, where you know, when we watch a movie, when we watch these things, we kind of are already acclimated to expect things to happen in a certain way. And so it's beneficial to also kind of match that pattern, but still creating some excitement when we're doing product narratives as well.

JJ 11:32

I love that advice and big, big fan of the, you know, keep keep the formula that's worked for, you know, 1000s of years now, as we've been entertained.

Colleen 11:41

Right? I mean, we've passed information down through stories we hear about this, you know, from like, songs and stories for generations upon generations, when you look back even to early tribes and things like that, that's how they communicated before they had written language. So it's definitely ingrained in how we talk and communicate and pass information as humans. So there's something to that. And you know, there's something to keep in and exciting as well, so that it is memorable.

JJ 12:07

Yeah, I love that. That's so amazing. So, so let's talk a little bit about some times in your career when this has worked well, for you. And maybe some times where it didn't because we can always learn from from our quote, unquote, failures. Let's start with the with the good stuff, let's, let's hear some stories of when, you know, storytelling, and using this as a tool has worked well for you.

Colleen 12:29

Yeah, this is something I've definitely learned over my career. And I would by no means call myself an expert. But it's something that really started hitting home when I joined Airbnb. And, you know, it's part of the fundamentals of our company, when we talk about imagining the ideal outcome and working backwards. And, you know, our founders have taken a lot of inspiration from Apple and Disney especially. And when we think about, you know, Disney and making movies, it boiled down to the storyboard that he started with. We've had that concept around Airbnb since the early days. And this was something I learned a lot over the my time at Airbnb.

Colleen 13:09

And, you know, the project where I think I did this, the best was when I was kicking off work a few years ago about host financials, which is how hosts interact with everything that has to do with their money that they've earned on Airbnb. And this was a very challenging project. Because if you think about it, money is core to every part of the host journey, it's something they have to think about when they join in terms of setting their goals, and thinking about how they want to get paid thinking about how they're going to set up their business to handle taxes, and you know, the things that come with managing finances and business. It's something that they're thinking about, you know, making sure that they're getting paid for reservations, checking their bank accounts to make sure that the money has gone through. And it's something that they're thinking about to check to make sure they're earned as much as they want that they are meeting their goals and their objectives, financially on top of, you know, all the other reasons that they joined the platform. And so it being that important thread throughout the entire host journey, we needed to work with a lot of teams across the company. And it became really clear how important it was to tell the story through the host perspective, to get people excited and to understand how these things needed to be ingrained throughout a bunch of different parts of our product that faced hosts.

Colleen 14:31

And so, you know, when I first started, I don't think I did a great job at communicating this. And I was struggling a lot with some of those things that we talked about early earlier in terms of getting stakeholder buy in getting people to understand why this was a priority, getting people to be willing to dedicate resources to this. And so I went back and thought about it a little bit more and was like, you know, let's actually give some examples of where where this really falls flat for our hosts and what the consequences are for our community and also us as Airbnb and, you know, what we ended up creating was a story about how money really equals trust. And if you think about anyone that you are interacting with where there's a financial transaction, if you don't trust them, it's not gonna go well, right? Can you imagine not trusting your bank? Can you imagine, you know, your bank, forgetting to send one of your bill pays or forgetting to cash a check and put it into your account, that would be completely unacceptable. And so we told a story about how a really important part of engaging with our community was building this trust, which was about how we interacted with their money. And then we brought in some data to show where we could be doing a better job. And with those numbers, and with that story, and understanding the impact, we started getting a lot more momentum. And we were able to get some of this work into our company launches, get things into work that was getting CEO attention in terms of projects that were very high visibility, high priority, and were able to make a lot of impact in terms of resolving some of these gaps for our hosts in our community. So that was an example where, you know, at first, I had to take a step back and be like, you know, why are we not getting the engagement? Why are we not getting the resourcing that we're looking for, and think about how to maybe reframe it. And you know, using some of the lessons I've learned throughout my career was like, Well, this is a perfect example where I need to think a little bit more about this holistically, and how to tell the story.

Colleen 16:34

And what ended up happening also is that majority of the work that was done on this was not actually my core team. And so I think that shows the success of the strength of the story where people were so passionate about it, they almost took up the charge on their own. And I think this is where storytelling can be really powerful. Because the way I look at it, it's almost like a megaphone. And it's like beacons, where it could just be me championing this or trying to get awareness to it. But if I'm able to create a really great narrative, it's not just me, that story can amplify this on its own. So it starts spreading in terms of more people hearing the story, more people telling the story. And so it can really amplify the work that you're doing, and make it so that it's a lot more pervasive throughout the organization. And it happens on its own, because it's something that's really compelling and easy to understand and easy to repeat. And that really creates a lot of momentum around your work.

JJ 17:31

What a great story. That's a great example of it working really well, but also, learning along the way, you know, there were some times where you you you realized it wasn't quite as impactful as needed, and then moving it forward. And I absolutely love the point about amplifying the message and the story. And that's any good story, you know, takes a life of its own almost along the organization. So I think that's an amazing, amazing example.

JJ 17:58

Any examples of maybe something that didn't quite work out and the learnings from that?

Colleen 18:04

Oh, definitely have a lot of those. And I love what you said about the story taking on a life of its own. I think that's a great way to measure because I often get asked, well, how do I know if I'm telling a good story? That's a great way to measure. Yeah, if it's starting to take a life of its own, if you see, if you start hearing that story back, then that starts to be good signal that it's something that you've done well. And if not, if it's falling flat, if people aren't engaging, you don't see excitement, I think then that gives you signal that you might need to continue working to improve it. So little tidbit there before we jump into, you know, examples where I wasn't telling a great story.

Colleen 18:42

And that kind of hits on how you know, or how I knew I needed to work on this. And you know, these stories were two stories from earlier in my career. And it hits on, you know, as a product manager, we know we need to understand the impact. We know we need to quantify the impact. And in both of these examples, I was more focused on the numbers. I didn't make it compelling enough.

Colleen 19:04

The first example was actually when I first started my career, I fell into product management, I didn't really realize that's what I was doing at the time, I was working at Procter & Gamble with our cash managers around the world. And I was building our systems and tools for how we manage the short term cash and investments in terms of the money that we had. After receivables came in and after we made the payables and the in between time between when the money came in, and when the money went out. And while the cash managers could explain what their challenges were, and I could pull together, you know, the different features and the different things that we were building, I was very much focused on how much time this would save how much money this would save, and you know, the numbers behind it, and I wasn't telling the story. And it was a constant battle that kind of hits back to that what I was talking about early on with the host financials work where we're struggling to get it resourced are struggling to get it prioritized. And sometimes it can feel like you're up against a brick wall. And that's what it felt like a lot there. I didn't realize the power of storytelling at the time, to be honest. And so I just pushed really, really hard and focused more on the numbers of, when we look at prioritization, these projects come out a lot higher, because they're going to contribute a lot more impact than some of the other things that are being considered. But if I took a step back and looked at it now, what I would have done is told the story about our ideal vision on how our cache managers could come in, and be able to understand where all of the money is, and what investments to make very quickly. Whereas today, it took them hours, they are piecemealing information together across a bunch of different systems. And it created risk for the company. Because at any point in time, if the Treasury team needed to see where all the money was, and with what banks and you know, where our risk was, that would have been a really difficult exercise to pull together. And we could understand the impact of that happening, you know, at a more broader scale. And if we had told that story, I think it would have been a lot more compelling, because people could actually visualize what we were driving as opposed to just looking at it piecemeal. And looking at it in terms of the numbers.

Colleen 21:24

A similar thing happened as well, when I was working on an ecommerce platform for parents ordering lunches for their kids at school is a platform that provided healthy school lunches. And it was a similar thing where we were overly focused on the features, and the pain points for a specific person. But we didn't pull it together into a compelling narrative of how this could work end to end. And so the lessons learned there were that this compelling narrative of end to end, even if you're not going to do all of it all at once, really helps people visualize why we're doing this, what we're hoping to achieve, and how all the pieces come together.

Colleen 22:06

And looking back in my career, I think a lot of the things that I learned at Airbnb would have really helped me to do that more effectively in those specific situations, so that I could pull it all together and get a lot more buy in and get a lot more momentum.

JJ 22:20

You know, what I love about those examples is that you took the learnings from from them, and you improved, right? That's what product management is all about. And for those of you listening, you know, when we when we mess something up, which we are going to do, it's just part of our world, it's too complex not to just take your learnings from it and do better next time, right? The host financials example, would not have been as successful, most likely, if you hadn't have gone through those missteps, right and learn something from them and learned what to take into the next one. So I mean, I think it's, yes, it was a mistake. And yes, it didn't resonate. And yes, you know, it was you could even I don't like the word failure in our world, just because there's very few true failures. But you know, it didn't, it didn't work the way you wanted to. But guess what you learned from it, and you move forward, and you got better the next time, which I think is really important.

Colleen 23:16

100%. And I think like you said, I wouldn't consider them failures, we still achieved things. But looking back on it, it's the realization that we could have achieved a lot more. And I would say the same thing about the story I shared as a success, there was still more that we could have evolved, looking back in the past, and you know, thinking about how we could have done things differently and what the outcome could have been. And I 100% agree with what you're saying that's what we do as product managers is we iterate and figure out how to do it better. And I would say we do the same with our practice, as we do with our products. And so this is something that I have been focused on throughout my career is how do I do a better job with creating these narratives and this communication, because it's critical to success as a product manager, like we talked about, and so everyone can always get better. Even the best storytellers in the world. They are always working to get better, too. So it's not something that ever you ever are like, I'm done. I don't have to work on this anymore.

Colleen 24:14

And I think that's the piece to keep in mind and just look back and look for those signals of when it's going well and when it's not. And again, those signals when we're struggling with the narrative are when we're struggling with the resourcing we're struggling with the buy in, you will get a lot of pushback. People don't understand why there's not a cohesive purpose. And when we see things when we're when we can know that we're telling good stories, and we have a strong narrative. We see the opposite. We see the excitement, we see the momentum, we see the visibility increase, and we see again, the story kind of taking a life of its own which materializes into other teams starting to champion it themselves and ask how can I To help drive this, and that's where you know that it started to become really compelling. And you're doing a better job at it not saying that you can't always do better. So it's continuing to look at the things that are resonating, figuring out how to do more of it, and potentially even figuring out how to capture it. Because I think a big part will kind of hit on this is, we don't want storytelling to just be verbal, we want to make sure that it's permeating other channels as well is that really helps it to be more pervasive.

JJ 25:29

So speaking of that, I want to I want to turn our attention, and I want to ask you about something, you know, we all know that, that we in product are working more and more in kind of an async fashion, right, at least parts of the time. Most of us have teammates all over the world and different time zones and are working different times. And none of us really do the nine to five, or you know, you know, consistent eight hours that the whole team is working anymore. So we communicate a lot in async, on demand fashion, whether that's written video, etc. It's It's not often this live interactive communication anymore, or at least not all the time we're working.

JJ 26:10

So let's talk a little bit about storytelling in this forum. Like is it as important more important, like a different role, talk to me about what you're seeing, and the role of storytelling in this kind of async way of working?

Colleen 26:28

This, this hits on it exactly. I think, when we're working async, this becomes even more important. And it hits back a little bit to that shared sense of purpose. I think that's been one of the challenges with with the remote environment and more distributed teams, is having that cohesive understanding and that shared sense of purpose. And storytelling can really help there, we hit some challenges, because it's not like you mentioned it's not in person. And there's a lot of when we think about storytelling, a lot of in person attributes to it. And we think, you know, we hit on this before in terms of storytelling being a very common way of how we shared and communicated information throughout generations. A lot of it was live in person, stories, singing all of those types of things.

Colleen 27:17

And this is where I think product managers need to get creative, because storytelling doesn't just have to be verbal. What do I mean by that, there's a lot of different things that you can create, that help trigger those memories of the stories. And so ideally, we will at least have some interactions, where we share the story and talk about the story together in person, at least in pieces, but where we think about these other methods of communication that really helps bring it together, and brings it front and center in everything that we do. So some examples of this is to start thinking about different ways that you can share the story beyond verbal communication and get creative. It could be visuals, it could be quotes from customers, it could be recordings of different things of different videos. This helps the story to be more pervasive, and front and center. And everything we do. When I think back to a place where this specifically was done really well within Airbnb, was when I was part of the experiences business, and how we, we all were surrounded by the story of how experiences came to be and why they were so important for our community and for Airbnb, with the founding story of the first experience that Airbnb created, and also stories about what enabled our hosts to be able to do. And this surrounded us through pictures on the wall, including quotes from our hosts from interviews. We also had videos from different experiences, we had videos of the first guest and the experience that was planned for this person. And there's like whole video of this person's transformation and the things they were able to experience. And so we had those lasting artifacts that were accessible to anybody. And they were also there to remind us, and I think that really helped to influence our day to day decision making, and making sure that that story was present and the customer is present. And so while I think stories are very important to have that like interactive live communication, at times, I would actually argue I think it's more important to figure out how to keep the story pervasive even when we're not talking. Because when we're thinking, and when we're making decisions, we're not always talking.

Colleen 29:36

And so having those other reminders becomes really important. And I think that is also the game changer and helping the story to take a life of its own. Because with those artifacts, you're creating collateral for other people to pick up to really champion the story as well. And that's when we're talking about like the beacons and other ways to start communicating this change and communicating this net sort of having those artifacts and having those other methods of telling the story outside of just verbal communication really helps to expedite that process and make it easier to scale. So it's not just you as one person trying to share the story. But now you're creating different ways for people to interact with the story and spread the story as well.

JJ 30:21

Keeping the story going, making it pervasive, that is such an important point of, you know, we think so often about okay, how can I be great at telling this story in that moment, right, this this three minute story, and get everybody engaged around the room, or on the other side of the screen? And that's it. But that's not it. That's the very beginning. Right. That's the very tip of the iceberg. So I love that. That's such great advice.

JJ 30:45

So my final question for you is the question I asked all of my guests, which is what resources have you used? Have you found valuable as you've built your storytelling skills? And what would you recommend for those listeners to go learn from even more as they're on their journey?

Colleen 31:03

I think it's a mix of different things. And some of the tactical things as a pm that I think help really crafting your story in your narrative, are thinking about Jobs To Be Done, you know, one of the core parts of the story and telling through the customers eyes, you have to understand the customer's goals and motivations. And so that framework, I think, really helps bring together that piece. And I've seen a lot of success with customer journey mapping as well. And that I think, pulls together all the different pieces, what this looks like from beginning to end.

Colleen 31:34

And a unique resource on that is something that, you know, when we talk about the visuals, and things that help the story become really pervasive, I gave some examples of the experiences business itself, which was, you know, it's a smaller team within the company. But we actually have also a very clear visual that reminds everybody of the Airbnb founding story. And we call them the snow whiteboards. And it gave it was one of our core values for every frame matters, you know, years ago. And there's a lot of resources out there on how these came to be. As I mentioned before, Brian Chesky, our CEO, was very inspired by Disney and the founders got together with the core team at the time, in early days, Airbnb and looked at how Snow White in the movie was made, starting with ironing out the keyframes of the plot. And they were actually sketched out in terms of creating animation and designs for the key plot moments. And that was the founding of Snow White, and the whole movie was built off of those key frames. And so this team said, well, we should do this for Airbnb in terms of our hero's journey, the whole reason that Airbnb exists. And so they mapped out the key steps of the host and the guest when they look at an Airbnb stay. And that became our Snow White storyboards, and their visuals that ended up being animated by an animator from Pixar. And we have those artifacts in the office. So everybody sees them. It's something that we learn about an onboarding. And so there's a way to actually bring that story to life through visuals. And that process itself and learning about that. And seeing that, and learning about that through Airbnb was something that really helped me refine my storytelling skills and really understand what this meant. And so I think those are some unique resources at looking at it through those this lens.

Colleen 33:22

And that also brought me more recently to think more holistically about like Disney and Pixar and moviemaking in general, and how that story is told, been told. And when we look at, there's some really interesting resources that tell about the story of how movies are made. The one that jumps to mind is Creativity, Inc, by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace. And also, there's a lot of things now on Disney Plus, there's a documentary on the making of frozen two, that's super interesting to look at from the perspective of how the story is actually created. But how they're able to communicate updates in the story. And it's yes, it's movies, and it's animation. But it feels a lot like some of the things that we do in product with early mockups and wireframes, and the importance of bringing visuals and to tell the story as well. And so I think there's some really interesting things there in terms of how we not only craft the story, but how we craft those artifacts and those mementos that help us communicate the story in ways other than just verbal. And so we can build that more comprehensive story across all of our channels.

Colleen 34:33

And so those would be the things I would point to, you know, from again, the tactical perspective, would be the customer journey mapping and the jobs to be done. And from a more creative perspective, looking at what we did, what Airbnb has in terms of the snowwhite storyboards, and then just what Disney Pixar do in terms of their creative process. I think those are some very interesting things. When we're thinking about storytelling and refining our plot. practice on how we tell better stories.

JJ 35:02

I love those. Those are fascinating resources and listeners. We will have links to those resources on ProductVoices.com. You can also learn more about Colleen and her website ColeenGraneto.com.

JJ 35:13

Colleen, this has just been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your stories and your experience. I've learned a lot I know everyone listening has so I've, I've loved you being here. Thank you so much for joining me.

Colleen 35:25

Thanks so much. And here's to better stories because it makes life that much more interesting, right? Absolutely.

JJ 35:31

Absolutely. I love it. Well, thank you all for joining us on product voices. Hope to see you on the next episode.

Outro 35:38

Thank you for listening to Product Voices hosted by JJ Rorie. To find more information on our guests resources discussed during the episode or to submit a question for our q&a episodes, visit the show's website ProductVoices.com and be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform.

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