The New SaaS - "Storytelling as a Skill"

What constitutes a good story & could that skill even be useful over the PLC? The popular answer is “yes” & the unanimous option seems to be “marketing” & “copywriting”. But is that all really?

Common Beliefs

[Subtext: I’ve done something really exciting in my recent past over preparing for this article. I’ve been speaking to a chosen few content writers, content curators from a really heterogenous mixture of domains across the world. The learnings have been pretty precious and I’m sure will help me tone myself, use them wisely as required over my jobs.]

Ok. Cut to chase now!

When I asked various writers, content creators to put a finger on one primary skill that they thought was mandatory and someone needed to possess and hone as a budding / upcoming writer there were really distributed choice of options that I got.

Amongst those:

• Relevance & Simplicity ruled the roost

• followed by Authority

• Structure, Focus

• Creativity, Language

• & finally Style

But, the turn of the tide has been pretty dramatic starting with the millennium and predominantly over the last decade where writers & good writing skills have found their way to becoming more essential and necessary traits across many roles in the organizational hierarchy and across domains as well.

And, to quote – writing is one of the primary requirements and one of the most sought-after transferable skill any product person / aspirants who are looking at product management as a career ought to possess, refine, build on & develop.

Let’s understand the impact and the difference of employing a well thought-over, well-written story and how that goes on to make a totally mesmerizing & evident difference as opposed to focusing barely & solely on the technicalities of the product over a case study.

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A Case Study

Let’s consider a product – “Wooden Log Houses” as shown in the image below.

NOTE: The motivation behind taking this product as an example here is perhaps that it barely has anything to do with technology / software and also gets a wider audience to correlate to it avoiding any specificity or the need to be aware of a certain space to get a hang of the concept.

Image Credits: Booking.com - Finnish cottages by the lake, Turenki, Finland

Case 1: Lack of product chops

So, let’s say this product was launched recently and the organization handed full autonomy and ownership of showcasing the product to the internal teams who were the people who planned & built the structure entirely (in this case architected, engineered & constructed).

Where do you think their thought process would typically start from?

Make no mistake here, as they would still be the best people to describe the entire structure getting into every inch of a detail over the aspect, design, material, aesthetic, color, space, facilities there is to cover.

Here’s a possible outcome of their entire exercise.

Materials used

Design

Construction Quality & Facilities

NOTE: I know I am missing a few things in here, but it is very possible that some of the architects, designers may also get into listing out a deeply detailed technical specification over the thickness, gauge, size of each of the materials (for ex: Laminate name: Canadian Balsam Wood Grain, Shade no: 11321, Sheet Size: 8 x 4 ft., Thickness: 1 mm) used there for construction. But on second thoughts, that’s clearly out of scope as far as this article is concerned.

And, no doubt. All this information listed above ought to be very crucial for marketing as well without which their whole pitch could go haywire.

Case 2: Product chops taking center-stage

Now, let’s say the Cofounders have been through their share of hardships over the course of their experience and do understand the importance of onboarding all the right teams at the right instances as required to support their growth plans.

So, it would only be safe to assume they have all the product chops in place and have also gone in with hiring experienced and able content writers as a part of heeding their marketing manager’s action plans.

Also, it is only but fair to assume that the internal teams have built their share of understanding of the entire space thus far and it is now a good place to start for the content writers.

But, before starting to write, good content writers expect a download of the job splitting it over all the sections as required to build an understanding at their end, So, here it is:

Now - onto the “Landing page” snippet

So, with all that understanding built now, let’s try our hand at writing a snippet of what could be a description that may find its place well on the landing page / social media for that matter.

Again, to be able to do this effectively, one could look at it over 5 distinctive steps:

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Case in Point

But, going through all this right from the very beginning of our case study, there is something that’s not been given its due. We started off with the product in question and explored the importance of good story writing skills as a part of having proper product chops in place over 2 individual cases.

• But, in reality does any product start off like that?

  No, definitely not.

• What’s missing there then?

  The part before the product is built or where it is all supposed to start from.

The storytelling doesn’t start from and isn’t limited to Marketing alone as is commonly perceived. Real good storytelling ought to start right from the idea stage, over envisioning how a product would fit into the ecosystem if it is not disrupting the space that is, and change people’s lives over the course of them onboarding themselves, using and then adopting the product seamlessly into their lives.

1. The first ever roughest form of a story that any product person would ever write is when he ought to push the idea onto his team / peers which then undergoes many developments, enhancements iteratively & incrementally over the course of time evolving itself into a workable, feasible product idea.

2. It is then pushed to the Leadership / EXECs (CXOs) desks in order to gain buy-in making story telling an absolutely essential trait to possess and carry all throughout the product life cycle.

3. Then the story forms the base of all the shared understanding that is built between every internal team who has begun actively contributing to the product.

4. The story then evolves over UXR & takes proper shape going into the Design phase with the development teams building the product using the very same shared understanding built thus far.

5. The story is captured by the customer-fronted teams and dropped onto the users which is used as a primary asset in building awareness and also highlighting how awesome the UX is.

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Conclusion

Myth: Writing is all about using fancy words for commonly explainable things that are fitted in with popular euphemisms as required.

Truth: Writing and especially when applied to the parlance of a product per se is definitely all of these & beyond:

• having an absolutely clear understanding of the audience you’re trying to target over the markets you’re catering to

• understanding their current position / pain over what’s already available and how that’s causing friction

• understanding how various internal teams got to tackling those problems via the solutions that they proposed which are now available & accessible via the product

• using the simplest of language to get the point across (there shouldn’t be a need to refer a dictionary to understand the pitch, with the possible exception of using deep technical jargons when targeting such relevant audience)

• making an emotional connection with the audience by using all info above

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