storytelling

“I think it is a career staller if you can't for a product person. Can do the IC level product management job, but getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and running the team behind the shared goal and all these kinds of things.”

“One of the most powerful skills Of a product manager storytelling, right? Because you look at generation after generation after generation, what people pass on is stories. They're not numbers. They're not stats. It's stories. And actually when you blend storie…”

“Most communication in business is round, white, and flavorless, right? Intentionally so, because a lot of people are afraid to stand out.”

“So two things should start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life. So you start with location. Where are you? Location activates imagination, right? If I say I'm standing in the kitchen, You've already automatically applied a thousand adjectives t…”

“Listen for people who say things like, oh, something like that happened to me once. What they're really saying is, I wish someone would want to hear what happened to me once, and so I am always someone who's willing to say, Oh, tell me that story. Offer someon…”

“Storytelling is not about facility with the language or your vocabulary. It's all about decision making. That's all it is. Storytellers are people who think before they speak. They make strategical, tactical decisions before they speak.”

“So often people load the front end of a story with all of the stakes because they're worried that the audience will not pay attention to them. So they think I'm going to throw everything right in front and that'll hold an audience for the rest of the story. An…”

“The shortest version of every story is the best version of every story.”

“Essentially every story is about a singular moment. I call it five seconds. It can be 1:02. Honestly, it's a moment of either transformation, meaning sort of, I'm telling you a story about how I once used to be one kind of person and now I'm a new kind of pers…”

“We create positive connections with items in the world related to our company by telling stories, and that means we've, like, built advertising into people's lives Without them even being aware that we've done it.”

“When you're telling a story in a formal way, if you're performing on a stage or delivering a keynote, or even delivering sort of a pitch to entrepreneurs or a sales pitch, essentially the story that you're telling should be very closely related to the story yo…”

“If you're telling a story about someone else, essentially you might as well be telling fiction because that person's not in the room and to the audience, they don't really exist unless they're, you know, if they can't see them, that person is just another huma…”

“Every story should be essentially a beginning and an end in opposition to each other, and you should start at the end. That guarantees that you have something important to say, rather than what most people do, which is they simply report on their lives. They j…”

“It's stakes, it's surprise, it's suspense, and it's humor. Those are the ways that you're going to hold people and keep them listening, and if you're not engaged in one of those four things while you're speaking, people are not listening to you anymore.”

“Our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart. Or facts, or statistics, or, you know, platitudes, or ideas that are not attached to imagery. So the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten. 100% you will be forgotten.”

“And the biggest thing is stories that we tell people, it's like the tip of the iceberg. And if anything, it even Doesn't matter. I've worked with a lot of folks who their teams say, stop it with the storytelling, stop talking at us, and they don't want any of …”

“I think the alpha is in design, just like in marketing. It's not the tools. It's not the channels, not the metrics. It's the storytelling. It's How do you cut through the clutter in the snappiest, most compelling possible way?”