Seven practical ways storytelling helps tech companies get products noticed, win stakeholder buy-in, align teams, and recruit the people they need.

You can have a great product and still lose the room

Picture the demo. The build is clean, the feature you spent all quarter on works on the first click, and you walk the room through every screen exactly as planned. Nothing breaks. Phew.

But when you finish, all you get is the polite nod, the one that means thank you Patrick, that was very thorough indeed … and … crickets. Someone checks their phone. The next item on the agenda is already sliding in.

You did everything right and the room still didn’t care. “Why?” you ask yourself. What went wrong? The product was fine, so you can tell the problem wasn’t there. But you walked them through what the software does and never once told them whose life it changes.

Instead, you demonstrated features. You didn’t give anyone a reason to feel anything about them, and people don’t act on information alone, they act on what the information makes them feel.

This is the case for storytelling in tech companies, and it’s a practical one, not a sentimental one. The investment is small: you’re not buying a new tool or hiring a new department, you’re sharpening a skill your team already has. Any human already has.

Humans have been wiring information into narrative for tens of thousands of years, long before slide decks, longer still before backlogs. The skill is already in the building. Most tech companies just never think to use it on purpose.

So here are seven places where using it on purpose pays off.

First, what we mean by “storytelling”

Not marshmallows by a campfire, and not a personality trait you’re either born with or not. Storytelling in this context is a set of repeatable techniques: a hero, a problem worth solving, a clear before-and-after, applied to the work you already do.

If you’d like the full version, I’ve written about what storytelling is and where it comes from elsewhere. For now, hold onto one line: technology is a story, and the user is always the hero, with your product being the guide. Everything below builds on this crucial statement.

1. It gets your product noticed

Your product is one of thousands competing for the same overworked attention. The user scrolling past you doesn’t owe you a second look, and a feature list won’t earn one. Feature lists are forgettable by design, because they ask the reader to do all the work of figuring out why any of it matters. How do any of those features actually help the reader?

A story does that work for them. It hands the user a version of themselves, mid-problem, and shows the problem getting solved. It’s one thing to say: “exports to twelve formats” and totally another: “the report your boss wanted by 10 is done by 9.30”. One is just an item on a spec sheet. This is a Tuesday morning the user sees themselves in.

There’s a well-known experiment that put a number on this. In the Significant Objects project, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn bought a pile of thrift-store junk for about a dollar an item, paired each piece with a short, invented story written by a real author, and resold the lot on eBay. The objects went for nearly $8,000 in total. The story, and nothing else, was the added value.

2. It turns users into advocates

The best marketing you’ll ever get is a user telling a colleague about your service or product, unprompted. But people don’t pass along specifications. Nobody leans over a desk to say “their API supports webhooks”. They pass along stories: time the tool saved them, the Monday meeting it rescued, or validation from a team leader for a job well done.

Give your users a story they can retell and you’ve handed them the words to recommend you with. That’s what turns a satisfied customer into someone who reviews you, refers a friend, and brings your name up in the group chat when somebody asks for a recommendation.

And a referred customer isn’t just cheaper to land; they’re worth more once they arrive. A Journal of Marketing study that tracked around 10,000 bank customers for nearly three years found that referred customers stayed longer and were worth at least 16% more over their lifetime than comparable customers who arrived through ordinary channels.

That’s because we tend to cherish recommendations from people we trust.

3. It clarifies your strategy and vision

This one is directed inward and it’s particularly useful for product management. A product story is a test you can run on every decision: does this feature belong in the story we’re telling, or are we adding it because a competitor has it? Or because an executive wants it?

When a company can’t articulate its own product story, it tends to build everything and prioritise nothing; the backlog swells, the roadmap reads like a list of demands, and the team loses the thread of what they’re actually for.

Calendly is the example I’d hand any founder. The company grew out of one frustrating problem its founder, Tope Awotona, kept running into: the endless back-and-forth of emails just to book a single meeting. The story was simple (kill the scheduling emails) and the hero was the professional buried under “can we hop on a quick 15-minute call?”, “does Tuesday suit you?”, “would 10 work better or 11?” messages.

For years the product did essentially that one thing and did it well, and the team weighed each proposed feature against whether it earned a place in that story. Awotona has described the filter plainly: a feature request only became important if it came from the kind of person Calendly was built for.

In a startup podcast from 2020, he gives this example: if an astronaut complained that Calendly couldn’t book a launch window to the space shuttle, that told him nothing, because an astronaut was never the user he was serving. Plenty of perfectly reasonable requests were turned down on exactly that logic.

The focus paid off: in January 2021, TechCrunch reported that a $350 million investment valued the bootstrapped company at $3 billion.

A clear story is a clear filter. It tells you what to cut, which is usually the harder and more valuable decision. (This is the strategic cousin of the seven Cs framework, context and complexity, in particular, are where a product’s bigger arc lives.)

4. It keeps your best people from leaving

A developer who knows why they’re building something writes better code than one who’s only been told what; plus, they’re far likelier to still be there next year – and that’s something that shows up on the balance sheet as well.

The why is a story: who’s waiting on this, what their week looks like now, what it’ll look like after. A team member that can’t tell that story is a team member who may be updating their CV between stand-ups – which they’re not paying much attention to anyway.

Engagement is the goal here, and the numbers are telling. Gallup’s long-running engagement research, a meta-analysis spanning well over 100,000 teams, finds that the most engaged teams hold onto their people for longer. Depending on how high a company’s baseline turnover is, the best-engaged teams see turnover fall by anywhere from almost 20 to roughly 40 percent, and in high-turnover industries the gap is wider still.

The story is what makes a developer feel they’re working on something rather than through it and people don’t tend to walk out on something they feel part of. In a follow-up article I’ll be writing about the day-to-day version of this: how storytelling helps people in IT and how I introduced a product story session in the induction training for all new employees at a tech company; this is the same idea from the company’s side of the desk.

5. It wins buy-in from the board and investors

Executives and investors sit through feature slides all day, and feature slides don’t move money. What moves a boardroom is a transformation: what’s different in the world after this ships, and who it’s different for.

Lead with the change, not the changelog. “We’re adding single sign-on” is just a line item. No emotion whatsoever. “Enterprise customers stop emailing us their password-reset complaints, and our sales team stops losing deals over a security checkbox” – now that is a reason to fund the next quarter.

Same feature, told as a before-and-after the people who are signing the budget can actually picture. Emotion drives decisions in boardrooms as much as anywhere else; the suits are human beings after all. Allegedly.

6. It aligns teams across departments and across cultures

Sales is promising one thing, support is apologising for another, and engineering is building a third, all because no two of them are working from the same story about what the product is for. Misalignment like that is constant, annoying, and expensive.

Grammarly’s State of Business Communication report, run with The Harris Poll, put the cost of poor and unclear communication to US businesses at an estimated $1.2 trillion a year and found that roughly one in five business leaders had lost a deal outright because of it.

That gap only widens when the team is scattered across five different time zones. A developer in Iaşi, a designer in São Paulo, and a support lead in Bangalore don’t share the same idioms, the same office in-jokes, or the same cultural shorthand, and a slide of bullet points is perceived differently. Hand all three the same story, though: the user, the problem wrecking their Monday, the small win at the end, and every one of them takes away the same thing.

A story is the most portable format we have. Every culture on earth tells them, and nobody needs the convention explained first. The anthropologist Donald Brown put narrative, myth, and figurative speech on his catalogue of human universals, the traits with no known exception in any society ever studied. The form is older than the borders it now crosses: we were swapping stories long before we sorted ourselves into nations, languages, and rival football teams.

A shared product story is a cheap fix for an expensive problem, and one of the few that scales across a distributed team. When everyone, every office, every department, can tell the same story about who the hero is and what they need, you spend far less time refereeing between them. They all know where the goal post is.

7. It helps you recruit the people you want

The best candidates have options, and a job ad that reads like a requirements checklist gives them no reason to choose you. Fifteen bullet points of “requirements” tells a person what you’ll demand of them, not what they’d be part of.

Write the role as a quest instead: here’s the system, here’s the mess it’s in, here’s the user waiting on the other side, here’s where you’d come in. The right people read that and recognise the kind of problem they like solving.

And the cost of getting hiring wrong is not small. Oxford Economics, in a study of staff turnover across five sectors including IT and tech, put the average cost of replacing a professional earning over £25,000 at £30,614.

Most of that isn’t the advertising or the agency fee; it’s the lost output while the new person gets up to speed, which the same study clocked at around 28 weeks. A story in the job ad is the cheapest insurance you can buy against a £30,000 mistake.

Nobody is “just a coder” anymore

There was a time when people in IT were treated as pure execution: heads down, tickets in, projects out, no need to know the story. Times have changed. Teams are bigger and the products are more complex, and a team that doesn’t believe in what it’s building will build it badly, or build the wrong thing efficiently, which is possibly worse.

Storytelling is how a company creates a vision and then keeps everyone inside it: the users, the developers, the board, the future hire reading the careers page at midnight.

But it won’t work as a one-off. You can’t tell the story once at an all-hands and call it done; it has to show up in the demo, the job ad, the investor update, and the Monday stand-up, again and again, until it’s simply how the company talks about itself. It takes consistency – but the companies that succeed tend to be the ones that decided storytelling was a strategic advantage and remind everyone, everywhere, where they stand.

The idea I keep coming back to holds at the company level too, with one small adjustment: a product is a story, your user is the hero, and your whole company is the guide that helps them win. If you get the casting right, most of the difficult conversations get easier. Ignore it and you’re back in that glass meeting room, demo finished, watching everyone reach for their phones, as your heart sinks.

Over to you

Do any of these problems feel familiar? The flat demo, the swollen backlog, the cultural misunderstandings? If so, storytelling is a cheaper place to start than most of the alternatives. Have a browse through the rest of the series, and think about which of the seven hits closest to home in your company.