Podcast

Product Love Podcast: Telling a Great Product Story with John Weeke

Published May 2, 2018

What’s your product’s monomyth?

John Weeke thinks about this question a lot. As a member of the product marketing team at Insightly, John spends his days trying to take users on a journey. An award-winning filmmaker, he likens the product experience to a really good movie – making a great teaser isn’t enough, you want people staying for the rest of the movie, and not falling asleep in their seats. That’s where a great product story comes in.

To him, storytelling matters not just in marketing or brand, but as it permeates throughout the product experience. Developing a story for a nurture campaign is just one step. Getting users through an initial onboarding flow is another step. But what happens next? I talked to John about how to go about increasing adoption by developing products and structuring experiences that take users through a whole narrative arc.

“Story is the operating system of the human mind.”

We talked about John’s favorite books (Hero With a Thousand Faces and Sapiens), his favorite software product (Airtable), and why product people need to care about storytelling. When a customer is adopting your solution, they see it as a call to adventure,” John says. “By signing up for your service, they hope to go through a transformation. They want to find within your product the magic elixir.”