22: Storytelling Frameworks to Qualify and Quantify Product Data

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Ariel Dos Santos (Peloton Interactive) to talk about storytelling. Apart from collecting data to qualify and quantify a product being developed, it is also important to tell stories based on data so everyone on the team is aware and onboard the production plan. 

Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 04:16 Storytelling is an important tool in a PM’s toolkit
• 08:58 The SUCCESS framework  
• 12:15 With storytelling, you become a lawyer, a detective, and a dreamer
• 13:42 The four types of story we tell
• 17:20 We want the customer to be the center of every story
• 19:37 Part of storytelling is giving space for people to react and to ask questions
• 22:47 Data is used to tell stories
• 24:20 Qualitative or quantitative data?
• 28:42 Observe and talk to several people to gather data over time
• 31:28 Demo-driven questions from the target audience
• 40:00 Which matters more for PMs, quant or qual
• 42:21 When initial inputs are in, you turn to quant
• 44:18 How qualitative data works
• 48:21 It depends where you’re at in the maturity of your product
• 50:45 You’ll get better at storytelling over time
• 52:14 Treat every interaction as an opportunity to experiment