No matter how innovative your product is, it will eventually have competition. If you are lucky, the number of competitors will be a handful, and you will still have most of the market share. Some markets are not that lucky.

Enterprise software solutions are quickly finding them amidst a “solutions boom”. With almost negligible barriers to entry, new products are being launched almost every minute (even while we write this) somewhere around the globe. Since technology advances at a rapid pace, every new product offers something new (valuable or not), and that creates a challenge for existing players.

The challenge with current state of Product Management

Traditional product management has constantly evolved around continuous product improvement. That is definitely an imperative. However, over time, product management has become more associated with marketing. New features and enhancements definitely need to be communicated to the end-users. However, leveraging them for marketing to create product differentiation is becoming a less and less effective strategy.

No matter how many features you add, there will always be another product with a better feature, thanks to the pace of technological advancement. While one of the inputs for adding these features and functionalities is customer feedback, the primary driver, specifically in the software world, is to highlight how the product is different or better than the numerous other products in the market.

And every other software vendor follows this very same approach. The result is that it is not just the software; the approach to enhance and sell it is also similar in the market. And that is where the product management approach needs to evolve into product story management.

The approach of product story management

Even if you are a leader in a specific category of enterprise software, you know that an increase in offerings is slowly eroding your market share. You are frantically trying to launch features and rename/reinvent products to align with what is new in the market. Yet, the slow erosion continues.

The crux of this problem is that we are trying to market our products to a pre-defined market. Even though we often use the term “build a market,” the approach used is to sell a product to a segment of people who are already bombarded with the same pitch from many other sources.

Every prospective buyer of a software solution has a story. The story captures their struggles, pains, and challenges. That story does not care about features and functionalities. All it cares about is that its current pain goes away. And suppose you can understand, specifically master the art of understanding this story of pain. In that case, you will never ever have to worry about lagging behind in terms of features and buzzwords.

And this is where product story management comes into play. Product story management is precisely the opposite of the current approach of success stories of how an existing client found success with your solution. That is important, too, but it is not what product story management is about. Product story management is about narrating stories of successes that have not happened yet.

That involved understanding the pain and suffering that a prospective buyer is experiencing and then presenting a story of how those challenges can be alleviated by leveraging your product. And if you show that in a way that resonates with them, they would not care if the buzzard “AI” is embedded in the story. But your story has to be authentic.

Here is an example. You are company A, offering a solution A1. ACME Inc. is in the news because it struggles with inventory management. You know that they use product B1 for inventory management. There is your opportunity. To harness this opportunity, though, you need experts in product story management.

Have you given a thought about why buzzwords like “AI-enabled” sell? Simply because in the absence of a story, the desperation to get rid of the pain makes prospective buyers believe that since their existing tool could not take away that pain, maybe this new feature-laden tool can.

If you have people who can:

• Understand why ACME has landed into the current sh*t
• What are the people, processes and systems failures that are the root cause

They can then evaluate if a suitable combination of people, processes, and software A1 could have a story of solving/avoiding these issues. ACME is not in the current quagmire solely because of solution B1. Maybe B1 could have also helped avoid the issue. They just did not have the story of how.

So if you can build a story of how, then publish the story, with the exact same circumstances as ACME, without naming ACME, and make sure that ACME executives get to eyeball that story while they are still experiencing the pain, believe me, you will build a strong brand recall. Even if they may not immediately switch to A1, the brand recall in the minds of these executives will remain. At some point, they will be in other jobs/roles, looking to invest in a software solution.

Product management will need to play a significant role in this; hence, they need to evolve into a story mindset. Features and functionalities are imperatives as well, but even behind the need for new features and functionalities are stories. Developing a deep understanding of these stories will help product managers extrapolate those stories into the world of prospective customers and their challenges.