There is a myth pervasive in engineering culture: "Product-Led Growth means the product sells itself." It suggests that if the UI is intuitive enough and the latency low enough, the user will magically understand the value proposition and upgrade to Enterprise.
This is a dangerous lie.
Products do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in the minds of busy, distracted, skeptical humans. To get a human to care about your code, a better story beats better documentation.
Storytelling is a Compression Algorithm
We often dismiss storytelling as "marketing fluff." In reality, storytelling is a highly efficient compression algorithm for complex information. A good narrative takes a thousand disparate facts—features, specs, use cases, pricing tiers—and zips them into a single, cohere…
There is a myth pervasive in engineering culture: "Product-Led Growth means the product sells itself." It suggests that if the UI is intuitive enough and the latency low enough, the user will magically understand the value proposition and upgrade to Enterprise.
This is a dangerous lie.
Products do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in the minds of busy, distracted, skeptical humans. To get a human to care about your code, a better story beats better documentation.
Storytelling is a Compression Algorithm
We often dismiss storytelling as "marketing fluff." In reality, storytelling is a highly efficient compression algorithm for complex information. A good narrative takes a thousand disparate facts—features, specs, use cases, pricing tiers—and zips them into a single, coherent file that can be easily transferred to another person’s brain.
When a champion at a potential client tries to sell your tool to their CFO, they don’t read the API docs. They tell a story. "We are losing money because our current process is broken; this tool fixes it; here is how our future looks if we buy it." If you haven’t given them that story, you haven’t given them the weapon they need to win the internal battle for budget.
The narrative is the API for the human brain. Just as you strictly type your programmatic interfaces to prevent errors, you must strictly type your narrative interface to prevent misunderstanding.
The Hero’s Journey (It’s Not You)
The biggest mistake technical founders make is thinking they are the hero of the story. They pitch their company as the protagonist: "Look at our AI," "Look at our speed."
In effective B2B storytelling, the customer is the hero. They are Luke Skywalker. They have a problem (The Empire/Technical Debt). Instead of Luke, you play the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi. You are the guide who hands them the lightsaber (your product) and shows them how to use it.
Your job is to shine the spotlight on what the customer becomes when they use your product, rather than on the product itself. Do they become the VP who grew revenue by 20%? Do they become the developer who shipped on time? That is the narrative hook.
Humanizing the Technical
We sell to businesses, but businesses are just collections of people. Even the most rational engineer makes decisions based on emotion and justifies them with logic. A narrative that taps into frustration, hope, or fear will always outperform a bulleted list of integrations.
This requires wrapping the tech in context rather than simplifying it to absurdity. Instead of just citing scalability metrics like 10M requests, tell me I’ll never have to wake up at 3 AM for a pager duty alert again. That is a story I can feel in my bones.
Engineering builds the engine, while storytelling builds the road. You need both to go anywhere.