The Importance of Storytelling
Photo of Connor Burtis.
Editorial note: This article is part of an ongoing series of essays on my experience building products. It contains thoughts on design, innovation, and technology; lessons on culture, principles and community; and ideas to improve strategies, processes, and wellbeing. It’s written with an entrepreneurial spirit, an ethos of openness, and a willingness and desire to drive and make social impact. Hard lessons make easy stories, and these are some of my personal accounts.
Product Series — 002
The fabric of a story is woven together by many disparate threads, each as important as the other. Design, product and community are intertwined from the start. How this is told becomes the importance of storytelling.
If I were to wager a definition of storytelling in the product-making space, it’d involve the creation of an ongoing conversation with an engaged community. The driving-force of the story is the evolution it maintains, in a cohesive, dynamic, persistent fashion.
If a product is going to have impact, it needs to solve a problem. However, to solve a problem, outside of intuition, it requires that product-makers actively listen to and incorporate feedback from the community. Naturally, this process can take on many different forms, but, at its core, participation must be encouraged.
The challenge, then, becomes developing appropriate procedures, relevant to audience and culture, that creates this type of ecosystem: ways to solicit feedback, prioritize requests, and share updates, etc. This is precisely where the art of storytelling comes into play: learning how to create a safe space to be transparent with the community, and providing clear and actionable ways for the community to provide feedback.
Every voice must be offered the opportunity to share their perspective, and no voice should be underestimated.
With successful product experiences, stories must be continuously told to the point where there is no separation between internal and external, and only one truth continuously articulates and expresses itself.
Once a community is bought-in to the product, and understands how it can directly benefit their life, magical things can begin to happen.
Here are five key takeaways of the importance of storytelling:
Product-making and design-making co-originate with story-telling: successful products have clear and relatable stories.
Developing procedures to create with the community is the art and science of storytelling, and no voice should fail to be heard.
The story you tell others is the story you should personify as part of your culture and relationship with community.
Transparency creates opportunities for greater speed, clarity, and participation. Obfuscation creates confusion.
Build a product consciousness through actively listening to everyone, and never underestimate the power of a single voice.
If product-making transpires in relationship to a community, storytelling is the truth-telling, or the ability to maintain an ongoing conversation.
At the intersection of design, product and community exists the potential to enact radical transformations that can yield significant changes. This is the importance of storytelling.
