How to communicate in a way that connects, inspires, and influences
The Challenge
One of the biggest challenges in product and transformation is the fact that you have to quickly and consistently influence large groups of people without any direct authority
When you have hundreds or thousands of people working on your product, platform, project, or program, it’s hard to communicate in a way that connects, inspires, and influences them all
So what do you do? You use the ancient art of storytelling
We all know what it’s like not to care. Good stories make you want to care
The power of a good story is that it has the ability to connect with people on an emotional level. It gives them a sense of urgency, it make them want to act, and it pays respect to your audience’s intellectual capabilities. Good stories make the dry facts and figures come alive with colour and sparkles
But I’m not a storyteller
Yes you are. It’s something we do naturally as humans, and we start doing it as children. Indigenous cultures around the world have been kept alive for centuries through story. Our answer to the question “how was your day?” is often a story. You have been telling stories your whole life
What makes a good story?
Every story has a beginning, middle and end. A promise, a conflict, and an outcome. But not all stories are good stories. Not all stories make you want to care. So what makes a good story?
According to the writers, directors, animators and storyboard artists of Pixar, the secret ingredient for telling a good story is to make it personal. Use what you know to punctuate and animate the key message you’re trying to get across to your audience. Make it real. Make it relatable
I don’t get it. What’s the difference? Give me an example
Let’s face it, people in product and transformation love working on the sexy, new, innovative things. The last thing they want to work on is the basic stuff, or the stuff that keeps the lights on. Yet in your position, I bet you’ve had to make calls to prioritise the basic and “keep the lights on” stuff over the “sexy, new, innovative things” on a regular basis. You’ve then had to face the music and convince everyone that it’s the right thing to do. What happens in those situations?
You’re already frustrated and exhausted by the million things you’ve had to attend to, so you simply make the call and tell people they need to stop working on the “cool new feature” temporarily because we need to fix the log in issue now. You tell the key players, you write an email to document the decision for governance purposes, and you update the central list of priorities so everyone can clearly see it. Nothing happens. People are visibly unenthusiastic, they secretly continue to work on the cool new feature behind your back, and your urgent log in issue is taking forever to see progress on. You feel like everyone is not listening and out of control. What if there was a better way to go about this?
Instead of just telling the key players, writing a short email directive, and documenting a decision factually in as few words as possible in the system, take the time to tell people the story of how you got there:
“I know we’re all getting a lot of energy from working on “cool new feature” because it’s an exciting step towards really revolutionising the experience for our customers. Not to mention we’re all learning and growing so much as a direct result of doing this work. But I urgently need your help with something
Our current log in experience isn’t working for our customers. It’s causing them frustration and costing us revenue. Revenue that we were depending on to fund our work on “cool new feature” so I need your help to make sure we can continue to do what we love
I need you to stop work on “cool new feature” for now and solve for our log in issue. Authentication failures have increased by 73% in the last 6 months. This has reduced active users in the product by 52% on a daily basis which is costing us close to $1 million per day
We know from our customer service team and our analytics reports that 90% of authentication drop offs happen at the password field. If we can reduce this to 10% we can get close to $800k of that lost daily revenue back
A couple of our team have been doing some early low-fidelity prototyping with customers. We can see that if we remove the password field completely and send one time passwords to users via text or email each time they sign in then we will reduce our authentication failure rates by 96%
Solving for this now rather than waiting until we finish “cool new feature” will save us $1 million in lost revenue for every day that it remains unresolved, and it will avoid us needing to compromise on how we deliver “cool new feature” - which we will have to do if we don’t have enough money to finish it”
The numbers in the scenario above have been taken from an example given by Jeff Gothelf on his blog, but I’ve added the context on either side. You can see how much more connected, inspired, and influenced your audience will be to change directions to work on something they don’t love in order to buy them the opportunity to continue doing something they do love
Your situation will be different, your data will be different, your decision will be different, and your script will be different. What won’t be different is the idea that a good story will go a long way to helping you win the hearts and minds of your audience
Want to communicate in a way that connects, inspires, and influences?
Let’s work on this together. Here are three ways:
Influencing for Impact: This practical 2-day workshop is for you if you want to influence a decision maker, influence a change in customer or colleague behaviour, or influence someone to buy something from you
Executive and Leadership Team Coaching: Work directly with Lai-Ling to problem solve for your specific situation in a confidential setting. This is for you if you want to develop and execute on a game plan that is 100% tailored to you
Leadership Development: Invest in the product and transformation leaders in your company with leadership development that is customised for their role. This is for you if you want to learn about people and politics
References
Gothelf, J. (2022). Storytelling - A Product Manager's Secret Weapon. Retrieved 10 July 2025 from https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/storytelling-a-product-managers-secret-weapon/
Pixar. (2017). Pixar in a Box. https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar
Stanton, A. (2012). The clues to a great story, TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story