Business Storytelling I — Principals

Recently, I poured hours into crafting the perfect presentation for VPs, meticulously organizing our team’s project ideas to create a compelling pitch. Despite countless revisions and carefully chosen layouts, the audience remained puzzled and unconvinced during the review. The project got stuck.

If you worked as a Product Manager like me, you may find the above situation familiar. Persuasive storytelling is a critical skill, especially for senior PMs. Without it, you may spend tons of time iterating your content, feeling frustrated with endless stakeholder feedback, and yet to get the approval you need. If you deliver a compelling presentation, on the other hand, you not only unblock your team but also leave a positive impression on executives, adding points for your career growth.

Building your frameworks will be invaluable to hone this skill. Consulting firms like McKinsey face the same challenges to persuade their clients and have accumulated rich expertise. I recently found a great book — “Strategic Storytelling” by ex-consultant Dave McKinsey. Combining it with my own experience, I summarize what I learned in a series of blogs, starting with high-level steps and the principles.

High-level Steps to Build the Content

Assuming you have done your homework (problem definition, solution ideation, prioritization, etc.), below are some steps you can follow to craft your story:

1. Select a Framework: Choose a narrative framework like SCR (Situation, Complication, Resolution) or SOR (Situation, Opportunity, Resolution) to structure your presentation.
2. Outline Your Story with Dot-Dash: Using bullet points, sketch out your story following your chosen framework. Organize your main arguments (dots) and supporting facts (dashes) using bullet points. The dots should serve as your slide titles, while the dashes will form the content of your slides. Write these in complete sentences for clarity.
3. Iterate and Refine: Review and refine your outline with your manager and other stakeholders. This collaborative step helps finalize the structure before you start building your slides. (Don’t move to step 4 unless at least your manager is aligned.)
4. Build Your Presentation: With your outline as a guide, create your slide deck, transforming your structured ideas into a visually engaging presentation.

Note that the steps mainly focus on presentations, but also apply to craft a compelling doc.

Guiding Principles

While the high level steps offer the actions you can take, principles will help you avoid obvious mistakes when crafting your story, increase clarity, and make it more engaging. I recommend summarizing your own but here are the starting points:

1. Progress logically by answering a question from the previous slide: Your presentation should follow a logical progression that leads your audience from one point to the next. Each paragraph or slide should trigger a question that is answered by the next slide’s title or the first sentence of the next paragraph.
2. Include summary nodes for subsections: In the first or second slide of each section (e.g. situation/complication/resolution), add a summary node/sentence for the sub-points. This will help your audience oriented for the storyline.
3. Expand the summary node with depth-first tree traversal: This is easier to follow as a story narrative. For example, when talking about what Jane did for a day. You don’t want to explain that she ate breakfast, went to work, exercised, and then went back to describe what she ate for breakfast (this is breadth-first traversal).
4. Only go as deep as needed to introduce the problem: No need to include extra details to showcase your knowledge. McKinsey typically goes two levels deep.
5. Repeat the summary node when moving across after going deep: Consider adding visual emphasis to the next node
6. Don’t include an executive summary at the beginning of your presentation: A business presentation starts with a SMART title (more to come in the following posts) to foreshadow the story. Exec summary includes dense text, is tedious to get through, and raises more questions. Also, you have little to share afterward. Some exceptions to this rule: a) When the beginning of the meeting is designated for reading, and b) As a recap on the last slide and use it for Q&A, or put it in the Appendix
7. Put project scope and research approach in the Appendix unless the deck is shared as a report or requires an explanation
8. Limit the number of slides to around ⅓ of meeting minutes: It’s better to cut less important content than rush through more slides.

If you find the high level steps and principles helpful, start applying them to your next presentation or doc. Seeing a positive impact is the best reward for me!

Next, I’ll double-click into the common frameworks that make a business story compelling and engaging. Stay tuned!