 Hey everyone, my name is Manohar. I'm a product manager currently working at Uber, and today we're going to be talking about mastering the art of storytelling as a product manager. As you're probably already aware that one of the core strengths you're developing as a product manager is communication. You're the linking pin between engineering, design, data, business, just to name a few. So it's only natural that written in our all communication is going to play a big part of your role. So why not get good at it, right? Now, we know that clear, crisp communication, that is to the point, is obviously important for meetings and email updates and general discussions. But product managers also play a big role in getting buy-in from different teams, from motivating to leaders why we should prioritize a specific problem and funded solution to creating excitement and ownership among those who will help bold test and roll it out. In my experience, one of the best ways to get buy-in from others is to use storytelling, to take others on a journey with you whenever you present, talk, or write about the products you're building. Just like telling a good story, when you know your audience, when you know how to draw their attention, use language to bold empathy with your listeners or readers, and when you speak from experience, these are all skills that can improve how you communicate as a product manager. These concepts are a bit vague if we don't just explain them, so instead, let's apply them to a particular scenario. So here's the scenario. You work for a company which is scaling and you notice that users are starting to complain about the quality of customer service. You spend some time getting used to the current experience and familiar with the committee gritty, and you notice lots of ways that the support team can be better empowered if they had better tooling. We've got a meeting tomorrow where the leadership team will be present and you want to use this opportunity to get buy-in. So let's prepare, shall we? First, it's really important to always know who is your audience. Thinking about who you're going to be talking to will always help you figure out what to focus on. Very often, because of all the detail we go into about a problem, we have so much to share, and if everything feels important, it can be overwhelming to prepare something like a slide deck on short notice. But having everything crammed into slides, wanting to share everything, and giving every point the same attention, often means that nothing really sinks in, and it's like a story without main characters or a plot without highs and lows. So think about who is going to be in that room or that call. Think about the context of the meeting. What do you want to have achieved with this group when it's over? In our scenario, the goal is to get buy-in from leadership and to be able to build better tooling for the supporting in the end. Based on this specific audience, you could decide to focus on, one, showing them how painful the current experience is for both end users and the support staff by taking them through an actual example. Two, you could quantify the impact that better tooling can actually have on customer support and therefore customer retention. That'll definitely grab their attention. And three, motivate for it to be one of the main projects that we work on in the next three months by actually showing them a plan or timeline that you've put together. Knowing your audience means that you always know what to focus on. And knowing what to focus on, it just simplifies preparation, it gives you structure, and it keeps your audience interested. Okay, so once you know who your audience is and you know what to focus on, then now you can actually structure everything else around it. So let's talk about drawing their attention. So already by knowing what to focus on, you can start by creating placeholder slides if you're using a presentation with each of those three focus areas. Just remember when it comes to presentations and slide decks that this presentation and your slides should always complement your speech. It should never replace it and it should never distract people from it. And just like telling a good story, there are also a few tactics that you can use to influence your audience while you speak. Some of them are setting the scene. So just like when you tell a story, you can set the scene when you're about to talk by summarizing upfront what that you've been looking into customer support and have identified inefficiencies that you want to bring everyone's attention to. You can manage their expectations by stating upfront the three areas that you're going to be focusing on and that your goal is to get their support to make the sobriety in the next three months. Another tactic in storytelling is taking someone on a journey with you. So build a plot. You can start by walking them through a typical customer support experience. Build empathy between your audience and the end users as you highlight every painful moment in their experience. Then bring in the proposed solution to save the day. Sell it with the impact you think it can have and conclude with what they can do to help make it all possible. Lastly, you can use pace, pitch and tone to really drive it home. You can use pace to actually purposely slow down when you want to emphasize a point or let something really sink in. And you can speed up in between. The same applies to how you use your voice. The sound and tone of your voice can be used to keep your audience alert by varying it and just keeps them interested. And the more you practice, the more naturally this kind of thing will actually come. So let's focus a little bit on what I was talking about when I said taking someone through the journey with you. When it comes to explaining a problem, this is your best opportunity to build empathy with your audience. You have the privilege of being the voice of a customer as a product manager. So let's walk your audience a mile in these people's shoes. Show them the problem. Don't just tell them. Use photos or screenshots to document the steps a customer support agent has to go through to resolve various different queries. If they have to use a spreadsheet to find answers because they don't have a database, show them the spreadsheet. If they have to manually move queries because they can't answer by using a type form, show them this below. If their team lead maybe spends an hour every morning organizing new tickets, show them an example. We have to remember that at the end of the day, we're human and we sympathize with other humans. It's easy to not take a problem seriously when it's vague and undelatable, but people respond to real stories. People also respond to data. So use it to really sell how painful the existing process is. Find out how long it takes for most queries to get resolved, how much time is spent organizing these tickets, how often maybe the Google Sheet breaks because of overuse, how many agents work on support and how much it costs us to train new ones and use all of this to tell their story. Lastly, you should speak from experience. So I know it sounds like you need to know an awful lot about a problem before you can talk about it, right? Well, that's not always the case. If you think that you need to be a complete knowledge expert on a problem before you can start solving for it, you might never start. The key is to actually start by finding all the existing knowledge experts and work with them to map out their space. So you could shadow a few of the support staff for a day, ask them what they struggle with, speak to the team lead, get data on how many tickets we get and how long it takes to resolve each one. You should always be growing your knowledge, but starting high up will make sure that you see the big picture really early on and will also give you a view of where you need to go deeper. Building this experience with a problem in this way will also make you a more confident speaker because let's be real, more you know, the simpler it is to explain it. There are some people who are really good at just winging it and can seem confident even when they know so little about what they're talking about. But for a lot of people, speaking in front of an audience is nerve-wracking. I know that I fumble this when I know what I'm talking about. Confidence comes a lot more naturally when I know that I've asked the right questions and I've spoken to the right people. As a product manager, you speak on behalf of so many teams. So when you represent their combined knowledge and tie it all together, you're playing such a vital role. To conclude, I want to point out and make sure you remember that your voice is your brand and that is why I think this topic is so important. Well, the reason why communication is just so important as a strength for product manager is because you're that linking pin. And all the work that you do with different teams to solve a problem is not going to get seen unless you go and make it visible. So every time you send an email on behalf of the team, give updates, demo progress, share new insights, raise blockers or flags, measure impact, you're speaking on behalf of all the people contributing to the success of the product. So make people remember what you say. Think about who your audience is each time. Purposely draw their attention to what is important. Keep them hooked by building on their empathy and obsess over the problem you're solving because often it's not just about what you're saying. It's about how you're saying it. All right, folks, that's all from me. Go get them. If you have any questions and you'd like to reach out, you can find me on LinkedIn. Good luck. Have a good day. Bye.