Product Manager as Coach

Are there plays in ice hockey?
Something that really fascinates me about football and American football.
I keep forgetting to add the American bit on the top
because I'm so used to calling football soccer
and American football football.
Ah, this is so confusing.
This is the sports coach coach thing all over again.
Hi, I'm Karl.
And I'm Danielle.
And this is Productly Speaking.
We're product managers by trade.
And here we explore the world of product management.
It's people and their stories.
We promise to keep it entertaining.
And maybe you'll learn something.
Shall we give this a go?
Let's do it.
Welcome to episode four.
Today, we'll be talking about product managers as coaches.
And Karl, when you first suggested the name of this episode,
I thought you were talking about vehicles and buses and coaches.
So it was an understatement to say I was intrigued.
So what do you mean by PM as coach?
Well, I wasn't exactly thinking about vehicles and buses
when I came up with the topic.
I was thinking more about like a sports coach,
you know, somebody who actually has to take control of a team.
And in particular, it's hockey season right now as we're recording this.
So I've been thinking about hockey teams
and how the coach of a hockey team has a lot of similarities to a product manager.
Hockey teams are big teams.
You don't have everybody on the team out on the ice at one time
because it's a very physical game.
And it takes a lot of effort out of everybody who plays.
So you're constantly having to swap out your lines.
So you've got like a forward line and you've got a defensive line.
And then you've got a goalie who stays out there the whole time, most of the time.
But you're constantly swapping these lines out.
These guys aren't playing hockey for more than one to three minutes usually at a time.
And then they're going back to the bench to be relieved.
And what that means is that as a coach, you've actually got all these different lines that you can put out on the ice at any given time.
And so kind of like with A-B testing in a product where you could go say, OK, a group of testers test it this way.
And this other group of testers test it this way.
As a hockey coach, you actually have the option to be able to say, how is this line doing tonight against these teams or against this line that this other team is putting out there?
And you have the ability to basically kind of try and influence that gameplay and try and put your best foot forward as much as you can, obviously having to give these guys relief to so hence the size of the team.
But that's kind of where I was going at with it, because the hockey game in a lot of senses is kind of like a live product management game in a sense, because when you're doing product management, you may have to adapt on the dime to what you're seeing out there with your product in the world.
Much the same way that a hockey coach would have to do that during a period of play in hockey.
Right. I also didn't realize they switch over the players so fast, like one to three minutes.
That must just be such a rapid game.
I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out American football and this sort of thing.
There's a Netflix show called Last Chance U came out a few years ago, and I just love it.
And then Bill Campbell, who's just the Silicon Valley coach and forever takes up space in my brain, which is great.
They're based on American football.
And so, yeah, I haven't really spent a lot of time around ice hockey, especially from this sort of perspective.
But I love that spin on A-B testing.
And I think, do ice hockey coaches, like what are they looking for when you put players on the ice?
What are they looking for in order to say, like, yes, this is working, we'll go the whole three minutes?
Or absolutely, that was the wrong decision, let's pull it off and switch it out?
Yeah, they're absolutely looking for the players to be getting the puck down into the other team's zone and to be doing the best they can to score.
So you're very much hoping that when you put your best forwards out there, that they're playing very well against the other team, that the action isn't down in your zone.
So your goalie is not having to do anything.
That would be an ideal game.
And that when they're down there, they're actually taking the shots and they're making the shots more than they're not.
So it's quite a binary metric almost.
Like, are you in the offensive half and are you scoring goals?
Yes or no?
Yes or no?
Yeah, it is pretty binary.
I mean, are you scoring goals or are you letting the other team run you back into your zone where your goalie has to keep defending?
Because if that's what's happening, maybe we need to change up who we've got on the ice.
Maybe we've run you too hard so far.
Let's see what happens.
And again, I mean, both hockey coaches of both teams are doing this.
So you as coach are constantly having to pick which lines you're going to put out there, but the other guy is doing the same.
And it is kind of just a back and forth between who is going to make the best moves and who's got the better team.
How is everything going to play out?
It's a very complex situation.
But then again, so is product.
You know, you put a product out in the market or you like test a new feature out in the market or you put something in front of a prospect.
You don't know how they're going to respond.
And you may have to change course very quickly as well, because maybe it didn't go as well as you were hoping it would, whatever this test was or whatever you put out in front of them.
And well, maybe if we did it this way, would you like that better?
Maybe that actually works.
And then again, maybe it doesn't.
You know, sometimes you find out that no matter which way you go, A or B, you've got a misfit in the market.
But and that's that's the hockey game you lose at that point, because no matter how you play the game, you know, your team just didn't quite stack up to the other team.
The other team was better for some reason.
And, you know, kind of like in a competitive situation, your product may not win for a particular use case.
You may get beaten by somebody else.
So a lot of similarities there between being the coach of a hockey team and actually playing product management.
Yeah, I guess the similarities there as well are different hockey games are going to have different stakes.
I'm imagining you have like local teams and local games and then you have national teams and national games and then whatever the hockey version of the Super Bowl is.
Like that's a pretty high stake game.
And I would compare that to product, right?
Of like there's going to be decisions and tests you put out that actually are pretty low stakes and it kind of doesn't matter.
You've got more time to think about it.
You don't have to rush versus this is a really high stake decision.
You've got to keep your eye on the puck.
Yep.
Yeah, that's kind of interesting.
You know, here in the United States, we have the National Hockey League.
It's made of United States and Canadian teams.
And it's interesting because there's almost no local players on any of the teams.
The teams aren't really local to their locale, except for when you start getting into Canada.
There's a little of that.
But you've got all these Canadians and you've got people from like Finland and Russia that have all moved to the States or Canada to play hockey.
So the idea of a local team is kind of an interesting one because it's not really local.
But yeah, the regular season, a lot of times, like you said, the stakes aren't that bad.
You lose a game.
Oh, well, there's always another game.
And there's like 72 to 80 games that you play in the regular season.
So there's a lot of games.
There's a lot of chances.
But then you start getting into the playoffs for the Stanley Cup and you want to make the playoffs.
And then you get into the playoff games and each level of playoff game, you know, as you go up the bracket and there's fewer and fewer teams, the stakes get significantly higher.
If you have upwards of 70 games a season, how much is it the coach's responsibility to make sure the players don't burn out?
Like that's a lot of games in quick succession.
Yeah, it is a lot of games in quick succession.
And you end up in a situation where guys get hurt.
You know, hockey is not exactly a light touch sport.
It can be pretty violent at times.
And you do get scenarios where people get hurt and they're out for a while.
And now all of a sudden, you know, you may have one of your best players out and the team has to kind of rally around that and play through that and figure out what they're going to do without this star player that they were expecting to have in these games.
So it does absolutely impact the performance of the team.
Sometimes teams are able to rally together and actually play just as good, if not better, without that player because they do come together on this.
And sometimes they lose their ways and they're like, we don't have this person out there anymore.
We don't know how to play.
And you can see it.
You can just see the emotional impact of that.
So that is another thing that a coach has to really stay on top of is just, you know, also much like in a product manager situation where you've got all these different people behind the scenes that are really making the thing come together.
You know, you are just the coach in the sense you're working with all these different teams of people to bring the product together.
You've got engineers, you've got documentation people, you've got marketers, designers, QA testers, all sorts of different types of teams to make this thing happen.
They've got emotions too.
And it's real people doing real things.
And if you end up in a scenario where somebody's out for a while, somebody gets sick, somebody gets hurt, that person's not there.
Well, you've still got to keep figuring out how you're going to play the game.
So that's, that's very similar as well.
Right.
And identifying which players or team members have influence and kind of, I guess, sway over the other players.
I'm talking about the positive side, but there's a negative side of toxicity as well.
Of every team that you work on some way or another has, has somebody who's quite toxic.
Um, but you will have to kind of get on the ice and play together and knuckle down and get on with it.
There is an element to paying attention to those things.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And there are, you know, in hockey, and this is probably also the case out there in the real world too, but in hockey, there's these rivalries.
And sometimes you get players on one team, really mad at players at the other team.
And, uh, you can definitely see how, you know, if you're in a situation where you're competing with two products for basically the same pool of customers in a market, which is what you're at.
Uh, you could end up in some scenarios where, uh, the players might not play so fairly for each other to try and get that, that win.
Um, are there plays in ice hockey?
Something that really fascinates me about football and, um, American football.
I keep forgetting to add the American bit on the top because I'm so used to calling football, soccer and American football, football.
Ah, this is so confusing.
Um, this is the sports coach coach thing all over again.
Um, in American football and then basketball, there are like plays set plays.
So it's the player's responsibility is to learn how they're supposed to move on the court and the call signs that cause those movements.
It's kind of like a dance, like you would call a play and everybody knows where they have to be, who they have to look at and where they go in basketball.
Sometimes the, the captain or the playmaker on the, on the court is that person who makes those play decisions in football.
I think the quarterback and the coach kind of combined, make those play decisions.
Um, how does it work in, in ice hockey?
And then how do you think that having a playbook relates to product management?
Yeah.
So in ice hockey, you have a captain and definitely, I mean, very similar to the other sports.
They've got whiteboards that they're sitting there kind of drawing out.
How do they want to make a play?
Uh, and there are definitely strategies in how you move about on the ice and, you know, how are you going to cover your other teammates or are you going to cover your other teammates?
You know, what, what is the strategy going to be for the next play based on what's happening in the game?
So there are definitely those, uh, similarities in ice hockey as well as a playbook for product management.
I mean, I think that as a company, as you continue to build out a product and as you continue to refine your go-to-market strategy for that product, you naturally kind of build together a playbook of this is, these are the things we've done from a sales perspective that actually help sell the product.
These are the things that we've been able to talk to prospects about that have worked.
Uh, these are the things that start to rise more in your marketing as you start to see certain things actually start to come to fruition and actually start to make a move in the market.
This becomes what we do and yeah, you do kind of get this playbook of how to sell the product playbook of how to do that initial support of the product and then a playbook of how once the products in a place to actually keep supporting it and also to then, uh, try and grow that business.
Yeah, I think back to when I started as a PM, I was so determined to figure out how everybody else was being a PM.
We've, we've already talked to an episode about how it's really hard to kind of learn how to be a PM and a lot of it is observation and a lot of it is experience.
But the way I learn is to kind of like read the textbook and then try a few examples out, right?
Like very maths brain, very science brain.
And that didn't really exist in product management.
The people that I was chatting to when I moved into the team were all kind of trying to convince me that it was an art rather than a science.
And so I loved leaning on that concept of playbooks to be able to say like, okay, for every single project or for every single release, there's a set of questions that I can ask myself and a set of like flow diagrams I can draw out to say, okay, I asked the engineers if they've done QA testing and they said, no.
So what do I do next?
And kind of what's the play and how do I bring the team members along for this particular flow or journey that we're on?
And so I, yeah, I love the idea of playbooks and just making stuff repeatable.
It also means that I'm not like a single point of failure, right?
Because you can have some of this stuff written down.
You can really start to share some of those roles.
How many coaches does an ice hockey team have?
I know in football you have like offensive coaches and defensive coaches and then head coaches and quarterback coaches and they all have to work together.
Is it the same in ice hockey?
You have a head coach and an assistant coach and they are working together.
And then you have a captain of the team.
There's definitely some tight collaboration between those three.
That's really cool.
I love the thought exercise.
Yeah, it's a fun one.
I was thinking about that watching a hockey game.
I'm like, wait a minute.
This is a lot like what we have to do in work.
Right.
So on that kind of similar topic, what do you think about PM as conductor or PM as a miniature CEO?
Oh, let's start with PM as conductor.
I have a lot of emotional reaction to PM as mini CEO.
By conductor, just, you know, you mean music conductor, right?
Sports coaches, not vehicle coaches.
Very, very, very similar.
Yeah.
Not vehicle coaches.
Although, you know, coach driver, you know, coach driver, coach, coach.
Could you do that?
The coach of the coach.
But then also as conductor, like music conductor or electricity conductor.
Orchestral conductor.
Yeah, I think we hear this one a lot and I can see how people make the connection, right?
Because in an orchestra, you've got so many instruments and they're all doing a slightly
different job and the conductor's role is to stand at the front and make sure everybody's
in time, make sure that you're all singing off the same hymn sheet or playing off the same
music sheet. And I think that takes so much skill just to make sure that everybody's in
step with everybody else. As with every analogy, though, like it only stretches so far.
How do you feel about the PM as conductor?
I like it. It was one of the first ones that I was ever told from my first boss in product
management. He was trying to explain to me, I think it was even in the interview process,
you know what product managers do. And he talked about it like being the conductor because
you're not going to necessarily be the one doing the things, but you are going to be making
sure that the people that need to do the things are doing the things and you're going to have
some control over how that is done. You're going to need to make sure they're doing them the way
that they need to be done to meet the needs of the product. And, you know, yes, there's the whole
like, how do we make the thing work? But then as the background, what you have to have in your
head, I think that the analogy works pretty well as you've got to understand the customer mindset
and the market so well that you know what needs to happen to satisfy that problem in the market.
Much like as a conductor, you have to know the piece of music that you're going to be conducting
so well. And you have to have this audio track in your mind of how it needs to sound.
And that's what you're trying to convince and work with the musicians on stage to actually get out.
Right. You have to be thinking a few beats ahead of everybody else. I also like how the,
I like how the analogy stretches to, and, and this is a, this is a flavor of PM. Not every PM is like
this, but the conductor is noiseless, right? Like they, yes, they come on at the beginning and they
bow and everybody claps and that's great. They kind of get their moment to shine, but actually as the
conductor, you're like the head violinist, like they're, they're, they're the ones showing off the
audience. They're the ones making noise. Like you could, you could replay that for every different
instrument in the orchestra. So as a team, they have to be making the right sounds, but also you
have to let them flourish as individuals. And I think being, being a PM sometimes is very thankless
and you have to take the win that other individuals have on your team rather than expecting a win for
yourself because PM is, is really hard to kind of prove what you did without the team kind of doing
it for you. Um, yeah, so I really like how it stretches that way.
The musical conductor analogy, I mean, in a good orchestral performance, you're not going to notice
the conductor.
Right. You shouldn't.
I mean, you can, you can look at the conductor and you can see what the conductor is doing,
but the emotion from the music is going to carry you. That's where your attention is going to be.
That's where your mind's going to be wrapped around. Not right. Is the conductor moving their
arm exactly the way I think they should, you know, that's just not going to be where, where your mind
is at, but that's because the conductor is doing a great job. That's true. Or if you mess up, then,
then you're noticed. Uh, and that's true in product management as well. Oh yeah. They know
people find you.
This is so off topic, but a product manager should be an umbrella. Like they should protect
the team from the rain falling down, but they should also be the one catching the rain.
It's complicated.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you do catch a lot of rain.
Yeah, you sure do.
And you have to, you have to move that and keep it away from your team as best as you can.
Mm hmm. So, okay. I think I'm, yeah, I think I'm ready for the PM as mini CEO conversation.
All right. Well, yeah, you have some thoughts here. So.
I just don't like it. I really have such an allergic reaction to this. And I think there's,
there's so many levels is why I think it incorrectly sets the stage for any product manager.
Usually you hear this statement, if you're interviewing a new company, it's like, oh,
we treat our PMs like mini CEOs. You think it just sets the wrong expectation because
you're not a CEO. So you're joining this company and you're starting this new team with this
maybe inflated sense of self or inflated sense of authority. And it's just really not setting you up
for success. Exactly. And that's the company giving it to you. You're not coming in with that
without kind of having that put into your mind. And then like another layer of why I dislike this
is that that CEO role is such a different skillset from product management. It's a whole other track.
And like, yes, you can have very successful CEOs who are product managers and vice versa. There's
definitely like blended people out there, but it degrades the value of a CEO role and title to say
that all PMs are CEOs. I think some of that comes in. I mean, you're not wrong to call this out. I think
some of that may come in just from the idea that PM is seen as a stepping stone towards CEO.
And it's almost like reading that and then doing the reverse of it and saying, okay, so the PM is
the CEO of the product. And in a lot of ways, and this is where I think this comes out, uh, in a lot
of ways, the PM of the product is very similar to a CEO of a company. They're not entirely dissimilar,
but I think you're right to call out that there are still different skillsets that are required
to be CEO beyond just being over a particular product.
And I think the similarities are probably why this statement came to be in the first place.
Like if you're, uh, if the company has given you that PM as CEO, mini CEO, you've got a product,
you've got a feature and you're the CEO of that product. You're the CEO of that feature.
I would hope that comes with the authority and autonomy to go out and make decisions and to go
out and make calls. And maybe you've got a budget to go along with that. And maybe you've got several
team members reporting to you and you can kind of build this mini empire around a feature or around
a product. I like that and what it gives there, but you, you have to follow that statement with
the actual authority and the actual autonomy. And it has to be real. You have to be prepared to let
that team go out and make their own calls. And I just, that is so rarely the case.
Yeah. I was going to say, I've never been in a role where they've given me that authority and
autonomy. I mean, like I have it up to a point as a product manager, but then there is a point where
all of a sudden, uh, everybody in the actual executive team has the say, and now they get to
actually hear out whatever the situation is that's required escalating to the executive team
because yeah, you don't have that authority and they're going to make a decision. And yes,
you can try and influence that decision and you can present the data as to why your decision
is the right one, but ultimately they're going to make a decision. It's not going to be
with you in the room. And then you're going to basically have it pushed back down to you that
this is what we need to do next. And you're expected to take that and implement it, whether
you agree with it or not. Right.
And that's a, that, that can be difficult because sometimes the decision that comes
down from on high is the opposite of which way you wanted to take the product in. And
that is where the whole PM as CEO breaks down pretty quickly.
Yeah. I mean, everybody's accountable to somebody or responsible to somebody like this. There's
always somebody you answer to. And if you're the CEO, it depends on the business, but exactly.
Like even the CEO has a board of directors or a leadership team or an investment board or however,
it goes, like they have a group of people they have to go and stand in front of and tell a story
and justify their decisions. And so those practices that you learn as a PM, where you're
walking into a room and you're giving a presentation, you're telling your story and
you're justifying your decisions. I've no doubt they would serve you well if CEO is your title.
Like, I think that's a really good path to CEO, but to conflate the two at a, at a lower level
is, is dangerous because I think it does breed this PM on a pedestal culture. And I disagree with
that sometimes. To go back to what we were talking about in a previous episode, you get that idea
into somebody's head when they're starting in a role. They're likely not the only PM in the
organization, which if they are, then you can disregard what I'm about to say,
but they come onto the product manager team and they've been told that they're going to be the
CEO for this product. They're awesome. They're expected to come in and be a leader and take
control. And what are they going to do? They're going to grab the pickle jar and they're going to
try and open the pickle jar. Every single pickle jar that the team has, they're going to go in and
they're going to try and open them and they're not going to have any concern about the fact that
they're trying to open the pickle jars that are still closed for good reason.
Right. And it's going to frustrate everybody and it's going to start you off on the back foot
because you're not leading with questions. You're leading with authority. And sometimes that's
needed, right? Like when the stakes are high and we talked about this ice hockey match, when you've
got high stakes, you need to be making the calls. But if the stakes are low or if you're new and you
haven't built that trust up with your team yet, you've got to be really delicate about some of these
things, especially the pickle jar. Getting started in a new team is a really difficult
thing. Actually, that takes a lot of effort and a lot of work on your part because you're coming
into an organization completely new. Nobody really knows you. Maybe the people that interviewed you,
they've got the most context on you, but then you've got to get established and you've got to
build that rapport and you've got to really within the first 90 days, you ought to have done some of
that. But still, 90 days is only 90 days. It really does take time to then submit that rapport
and actually keep it to where people believe, yeah, I can trust this person to do what I need to. And
that's really key to have to remember when you're going into a new world that that's reality. And yeah,
if you come in as many CEO, it's just that's not going to work so well.
Right. I don't want to loop us back around to ice hockey, but that's what is so surprising to me
about how quickly they switch team members out. In my own teams, when I think about switching
one or two people, maybe even two or three people, you know, like org chart changes happen,
people leave, people join. When you make a significant shift in a team, I think it can
take anywhere between three to six months to get that team to a place where they're running as
quickly before the change happened. So when you say like, oh, ice hockey team players,
like they switch around every couple minutes, like every time they switch around, you're changing
the makeup of the team and they're having to respond to each other and to perform so much
faster than you would ever expect in a, in a work environment. I really, I really don't think teams
gel in under three months. Yeah. For big changes, really big changes. Yeah. I mean, even though there
are these different lines within a team, the whole team is still a team. They practice together. They
spend a lot of time together. You know, they're, they're working on that team mentality. So yes,
it is like a sub team within the team. It is still the same team. And so I think that it would be if you
then started pulling players off of a team and bringing new players in, you'd see that same thing.
And you'd have to have that time where people come together and gel. Sometimes on the ice,
you'll see a team that really does look solid and like, they've really got it together. And then
some nights, the same team will come out on the ice and you'll wonder whatever happened. You'll be
like, wow, they have completely forgotten how to play as a team. So you have all those realities
still very much in it. Yeah. I guess that's why the preseason is so important because a lot of those
big changes with, with players and personalities onto a squad will be in that, uh, what do they call it?
They call it something in soccer, British football, where you kind of have the, the transitions
between teams and you like buy players from one team to another. And then you have the training
season and the preseason, and then you actually start playing the games and all of that, I guess,
is to get to that like forming, performing stage of, of team building. Okay.
And it's not even just British football. I mean, that's, that's football in the rest of the world.
It's, it's only not football here in the U S you Americans make everything different.
Yep. So I guess that that's it for ice hockey, but on the, the PM is mini CEO. I think a lot of the,
the nuance is lost in some of these phrases of like, Oh yeah. PM is coach PM is a mini CEO.
And some of that, like some of this discussion, it's great to chat it through with you,
but a lot of it is lost in the, in the five words that we share with each other.
Do you think folks have lost patience for nuance?
Yeah. I think just society in general has lost patience for nuance because nuance is what happens
when you actually have to use more than a few words to describe something. Uh, and I think that
we live in a culture that wants everything as a soundbite and wants to be able to listen to
something for, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 seconds, maybe 30 is even pushing it and say, okay, based
on what I've just heard, this is what I've decided. This is what I now know must be true. Heard it on
the internet, which is, uh, that's awful. Don't ever believe everything you hear on the internet.
Um, but you know, especially if the sentence starts, I saw it on Tik TOK.
Oh gosh. Yes. That, that, that is a social network I stay far away from.
Um, I don't blame you.
Oh, stay away from Tik TOK everybody. Um, but yes, I think that when you get to this
soundbite mentality, you do lose the nuance. And it's interesting that you bring this up because
as a product manager, you've really got to be able to go all the way from the super simplistic
form of communication, you know, like distill what you're trying to do down into as few words and
ideas as possible all the way to the highly complex understanding of what you're trying
to do. Like you may be working with an engineer and need to actually get down into a discussion,
a deep technical discussion about how something is architected. And that may become very complex
and it may get very in the weeds. So you've got to be able to talk that complexity in your
marketing. You've got to be able to talk very simplistic. And then somewhere in between,
you've got to be able to deliver the nuance to the message because you know, an example of this
is like Apple, Apple puts out the iPhone. We all know what an iPhone is. The marketing's amazing.
It's brilliant. Makes you want the iPhone, uh, makes you want the new iOS update. They do an
amazing job of this stuff every time they put it out there, but you get the iPhone home and the iPhone
does everything that the marketing says it does, but it's got some annoying quirks and they don't tell
you about those annoying quirks in the marketing because that would be the nuance. And we don't
want to bring up all these little nuanced details that are like, well, this works this way, except in
this one scenario where it doesn't quite work that way. But by that point, you've already got the product.
I don't know what you're talking about. I love my iPhone. There's nothing wrong with my iPhone.
Leave me alone.
Nothing? I mean, there's thousands of things that those things do. You have nothing that you can
complain about with your iPhone. I don't want to talk about it. Perfect. Yeah. So you've seen these
things. You've seen some of the nuance where it's like, Oh, that wasn't quite like it was.
Yes, I definitely. So what do you think, Danielle? I mean, have we lost nuance? Am I
onto something here? I do think you're onto something. I think we're so tuned to hear the top
level. There's so much content. And like you said, social media is one of the reasons for this,
but news outlets, everything, there's so much content always flying around that a lot of us
read the headlines and then skip onto the next thing, which means that obviously our communication
is going to follow that pattern. So PM is a mini CEO is a headline. Somebody grabbed it,
sounded catchy. And then it's, it's continued to grow without the following paragraphs or the rest of
the video or whatever it was that that person was trying to explain. Like we've grabbed the clickbait
and that's what's, what's transitioned from human to human and mouth to mouth. I think when I try and
ensure in my own world that, that people aren't walking away with just the headline is to embed stuff
into stories. Um, and to just build out the rest of the environment. Um, and to say like, you know,
there's, there's a headline, there's a title to this story, but also remember the story that I'm
about to tell you because a lot of the nuance is hidden in there. Um, Goldilocks and the three bears.
Great. That's the headline, but there's nuance in that they weren't friends. The bears were a family
and Goldilocks invaded their home. And you know, you kind of, there's, there's extra to details to
that that you don't take a long time to explain. You can get through Goldilocks in 60 seconds if you
wanted to, but there's a lot of detail in there that really gets captured. So I think for me,
storytelling really helps with some of those bits. So how would you, you know, okay. It's a great point
about storytelling. Say that you're writing a blog that you're going to tell a story and you've got that
headline because of the soundbite style, uh, acceptance of information that we've kind of
found ourselves in. How would you structure that blog in such a way that you got that nuance across
early? We're really stretching into design here. I love it. I think it was Thomas Friedman that I
heard a podcast he was doing a few years ago now. And it's really stuck with me that every time you
write an article, whether that be for a paper, for a blog post, it could just be a really long
Instagram post, come at it from a frame of reference where you're either turning the lights
on for somebody, you're educating them, or you're burning a fire for somebody. Like what are you doing
to the reader? Do you want to educate them or do you want to inspire them to do something? You're
lighting a fire of interest in them. Um, and so just having that theme run through your content
and making sure that that's really solid before you even start writing, I think is a really key
point. And then introducing the story in every story you have a hero. Um, and so being really
clear on who your hero is, your hero could be a group of people, right? Like it, it could just be
one individual, it could be the author, it could be the person the author is writing about, but just
being really clear on what you're trying to do with your piece of content and then who you're writing
about, like where is this journey taking us? Those two things are memorable and, and they don't have
to be called out explicitly, but the reader will remember those two things. So try and nail them.
And then stories are broken into sections. Donna Litchell, I think is her last name, um, talks about
story in a really interesting way. Would definitely recommend like the YouTube videos or blog posts
you can find of hers online. Um, the, once you've got the hero, the hero goes on a journey, they
encounter something that kind of gives them a crisis moment and they overcome their crisis moment with a
climax and then home is better than it was before. And so that's where you want to take kind of your
stories. And if you can distill it down into a couple of bullet points and then add content on top
to those bullet points, then I think you have a really solid
scannable piece of copy. Yeah. That was an intense answer. Sorry. No, that was a great answer
actually. And you know, having worked with you, I knew you were going to go there on that question.
So I guess it's kind of, you can say, but, um, yeah, I mean, you and I have worked on a particular
product before where we did embed story into the product, because you start at home, you're going
to do a couple of things in the product and where you get to at the end, you want to make sure that
home is better. And we absolutely took those elements that you were just talking about as part
of story and applied them to the product so that the customer's journey through the product followed
these elements of story. Yeah. And I think that that made a very powerful user experience doing it that
way. In that situation, our hero was our user. And again, and again, it comes back to like,
were we trying to inspire them to do something or were we educating them? And I think in the
experience you're talking about, it was kind of an educational piece of like, we're introducing you
to a flow. These are the things you're going to need to take with you. Here's some questions,
yada, yada, yada. Great. You're home and look how much prettier it looks now you've filled in the form.
And so I think there for us, we did a lot of research on that user. So really, and this is
where heroes and personas start to combine as well. You'll hear folks talk about personas and they're
really just the person that you're focusing on going through the user journey. And yeah, when you
think about story, it's the hero of the story. So, you know, what are they struggling with? What are
their motivations? What are the values? It's very much a persona. Personas is something that we
ought to probably do a whole episode on because you can really dig deep into personas. I'm sure we
could. Yeah. And what makes a good persona versus what doesn't really make a good persona because,
you know, you can talk about people in one way and it's not descriptive enough for what you're doing.
You need to change up and get to where you're actually hitting the points that matter
about that person's personality so that you know what you need to be targeting. So that would be
an excellent episode for us to do. But I think that really does kind of bring us to the end of
episode four, which is also the end of season zero. So Danielle, what's our call to action for today?
Zero. Okay. Take time to learn about different roles from adjacent team types. Today,
we talked about sports coaches, music conductors, but there's a whole bunch more of examples of
leadership out there and how those styles show up in different environments in order to make
efficient teams. Yeah. So let us know what you find by leaving a comment. We'd love to hear your ideas.
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