AMA: Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, Platform & Pricing, Shana Iles on Storytelling

Great question! Most of the storytelling frameworks I go back to repeatedly are focused on: Identifying audience challenges and needs Structuring your ideas clearly - the before → after, from → to states Laying out your audience’s problem, your solution, and the benefit in a clear and easy to follow way Pressure testing the story to see if you can add more excitement, interest, or suspense to keep the audience engaged To that end, here are some frameworks I use: Duarte’s storytelling resources - ...Read More

You’ll need to do two things: To gain internal alignment, identify who your stakeholders are and how you want to bring them along in your process. Do you need to involve them in workshops and brainstorming? Or brief them at regular intervals to get their feedback before you finalize your recommendations? I’d recommend, at a minimum, collecting their input on what ‘good’ looks like to them. This could be competitors' positioning, prior examples of work that they think hits the mark. Lead an exerc ...Read More

This is a great question because it’s actually combining two different topics - brand archetypes and storytelling. Brand marketing absolutely involves storytelling - but be careful making your brand the center of the story when it comes to presenting your product. Remember that your customer is the protagonist of your storytelling, and your product and brand are the supporting cast, the ‘magic gift’ that makes change and overcoming adversity possible for them. For brand archetypes - think about ...Read More

Having a very technical and proprietary differentiator is great! To craft a message around this, the key is understanding for whom you are telling the story around this differentiator. For a more technical audience, you may not need to change much about how you describe the differentiator - just work with your technical subject matter experts to ensure it’s described as accurately as possible. For a less technical audience, you’ll need to lift out why this algorithm is differentiated, minimizing ...Read More

You’re right that attention spans are low, which makes communicating a breakthrough message and grabbing your audience’s attention challenge. This means your message must be very sharp and differentiated - but this takes discipline and focus! Focus on identifying, and then aligning internally, on your table stakes vs differentiators. Hone in on just 1-2 over a laundry list. Validate your differentiators - with customers, analysts, etc - to ensure they resonate with your intended audience. Then f ...Read More

This depends on the channel and format you are using to tell your story. What you are looking for is data on resonance and persuasiveness, which can be either quantitative our qualitative. When I look at this measurement question, here are the supporting questions I’m asking to drill in and assess: Does the story ‘land’ with my audience? How can I be sure that the right audience has heard my message? Through which touchpoints are we telling the story today? What asset(s) are doing this - website ...Read More

This is a classic PMM challenge. You have to get a bit creative in your you source social proof. Here are a few options: See if you can get the customer to agree to an anonymized case study, but still specify company size, vertical, geo, and role. You can still tell an illustrative (and specific) story this way, but it may lack some of the gravitas of a big logo. Source opinionated metrics via a survey. You can use tools like TechValidate for this, or develop and run your own survey across your ...Read More