A product manager is always writing stories. While most professionals have to narrate stories to only their colleagues and customers, product managers have a harder job: writing documents to persuade a range of audiences.

For instance, three months ago, we spoke to a team of five senior leaders who manage an army of product managers in a Bengaluru-based unicorn. They spent nearly seven hours listing the challenges their product team faced—from writing compelling narratives around the products for external parties to communicating with teams internally. By doing so, they laid out their expectations from The Ken’s Narrative Thinking Programme.

And as trainers, we listened.

Then, to step into the shoes of product managers to understand their professional lives in great detail, we asked:

Who are the primary audiences for each product document? What is the feedback you receive from them? What works and what doesn’t? To what extent do you want to stick to the template?

When it was not a product unicorn in Bengaluru, I found myself listening to the problems of leaders from a Nordic company facilitating the use of electric vehicles (EV) in their office in Gurugram. Another time, I spent three hours on Zoom calls with the entire sales team of a 34-year-old heavy-machinery maker situated in the outskirts of Ahmedabad.

All of them shared distinct learning goals. The unicorn wanted to improve the product documents to feel more inspired, the EV facilitator sought to rebrand itself with a lasting narrative, and the machinery maker wanted to learn to create a narrative for investors as it was planning to go public. 

After each of them completed the session, we asked if they found the learnings relevant and useful—all because their primary objective was to use storytelling to improve their business outcomes.

This is what they told us.

It’s not just these three firms. During the past two years, over 400 organisations, big and small, have applied for our Narrative Thinking Programme for Teams. And there’s one thing all of them believe: This is the best time to learn storytelling. 

Storylistening before storytelling 

When The Ken’s learning vertical decides to train a team in business storytelling, we begin with what we know best—understanding you/the needs. It is only after leaders share what their business needs are that we customise the curriculum to achieve those goals. To that end, we conduct multiple rounds of interviews.

Here is a snapshot of the process.

To begin with, the first thing we need to know is where the company is on its journey. Is it just starting out or reinventing itself—or does it want to go from good to great? Is it preparing to go public, or does it want to unlock the next level of excellence?

Two, alongside the interviews, we share surveys to understand what the participants want to learn. Some of the most common answers included learning:

• How to tell stories that create value 
• How to effectively engage with stakeholders.
• How to narrate complex issues in simple ways
• Actionable insights to advance my work objectives
• How to structure thoughts and engagingly communicate key points to the audience 

Next, we ask what they don’t want the program to be about:

• Not be preachy
• Avoid spoon-feeding. No need to cover the basics of communication
• Theory of storytelling
• Not generic lectures on public speaking and presentation-making

While the end goal of these pre-programme surveys and interviews is to help us gauge participants’ expectations, it also ends up revealing the constraints under which each team functions.

For instance, a product manager said that her role involved speaking with merchants; each of them had a different background and needs—and they often didn’t understand tech as well as she did. She told us that she expected to learn how to communicate with different sets of audiences in a manner that worked for each one of them.
Another leader overseeing international exports at the aforementioned heavy-machinery company stated, “How do I convince my internal team that we need to work/move fast? Because the time my team is building the product, the customer’s patience might run out. Is there any way to narrate a difficult story for internal and external audiences so that they take it well?” 

It’s this depth of understanding—through listening—why our post-programme ratings have, on average, been 8.6 on 10 over the last six months.

Another reason is that we have made space for participants to craft, revise, and hone their stories—within the classroom itself.

It’s about the business first. Remember.

Imagine it is 2030, XYZ Ltd (imaginary company name) has gone public, and you are the CEO writing the first letter to shareholders. Write the headline focussing on your belief, vision, and course of action to make the audience care about the story.

It is an exercise that certainly jolts everyone and is one of the six carefully customised exercises that the participants answer in the one-day narrative workshop.

And it hits home. At first, there is silence. But soon after, it is hard to stop the groups from passionately debating the right answer. “The process—of creating stories in real time while learning the concepts—is both frustrating and rewarding,” as one of the participants put it. 

And it’s just the beginning of realising who you are. What your purpose is. Where you are going. 

Following the one-day workshop, the subsequent half-day masterclass that dives deeper with hand-picked case studies and tailored exercises often results in enthusiastic debates—the kind usually observed in newsrooms and publishing houses—on which headline is the right fit for the website’s About Us section.

And the result, quantitative and qualitative, is evident in the post-programme surveys. 

“The programme helped give structure to concepts that were otherwise vague. I have already begun using it to analyse what I wrote in the past and understand how that could have been improved. I will apply the learnings from the sessions every time I write,” shared a participant in April.

Empowered with a fresh way of thinking, a new skill set, and a bouquet of tools, the participants get to see how storytelling supercharges their teams.

If you want to enrol your team in The Ken’s Narrative Thinking Programme, apply here.

With inputs from Mathew Jacob 

Disclaimer: The Ken’s Learning team is not involved in editorial decisions and operates independently of its Editorial team.