Alberto Peña Abril

Selling a business case

clarity

January 2025

Humans tell stories. That’s what we do.

Stories help you learn, help you feel, and help you empathise. Stories give you the experience without the hassle of living through it.

How can you use this in your day to day life?

In order to become more effective, software developers need to get better at storytelling.

Examples:

Nike sells shoes with stories, not with a set of features. Their ads are about becoming your best self, not about how good their shoes are. Of course, the shoes are good, nobody is going to buy them if their not. But that’s not the selling point, the selling point is that they will help you become what you desire to be with them.

That’s what get stuck in your brain.

As a software developer, we talk too much about technology. Kubernetes this, Rust that. That’s very important, but that’s not what’s going to get you the budget approval that you need. You need to tell the story of why you want to do what you want to do.

How can you use storytelling structure for your own benefit? Stories usually are told in this way:

In our case, we can tell this story from the point of view of your line managers, or whomever you have to report to. When you want to get something approve, they usually don’t have knowledge of the problem you want to solve.

This implies two things, you need to understand the problem you want to solve, and how to explain it,

Act one is starting to raise awareness of the problem. Act two is getting them to accept that there is an issue Act three is explaining why the problem needs fixing. The important thing here is to show that inaction only brings pain, while change brings a benefit Act four is about presenting the worst case scenario and the consequences of not changing Act five is about presenting your solution and making sure that changing is the only way forward

Example 1:

Our registration process is unstable. If you look at our customer support incident, 70% percent are related to registration issues. It’s important to spend the time on this problem because in the last month, we have had two incidents that costed us 50K. If we keep things as they are, that figure will only go up becuase there is nobody in the company right now that understand the underlying techonology. We have two different options to fix this:

Example 2: This team is overwhelmed by external demands The organisation growth rate last year was 100%, but this team hasn’t growth at all. That means that they have to handle now, with the same people, twice more work. If we don’t do anything, this will result in missing deadlines, worst quality, and burnout We are at risk of loosing the people in this team, and having to rebuild it which will both be expensive and time consuming, making us inefficient. The solution we propose is to move the team from an end-to-end feature team to a platform/product team, so the rest of the organisation can self-serve. That will stop this team from being a bottleneck and will make stakeholders more independent and efficient. It will also improve the teams moral, which will reduce the likelihood of burnout.

The important part

The important part is that by the end of act three, people need to answer this question: will you revert and die, or change and live? Basically, they need to understand that inaction means death, while change means a better life.

Follow through is the key to success. Deliberate practice. Focusing on the journey to achieve your goal. Doing a difficult thing one step at a time. Compare yourself with the baseline, not with your future you. Reach the midpoint. Coming back (regress) after reaching the midpoint is as difficult as keeping going. Also, your brain will buy on the story you are telling better. Work day by day to reach the midpoint. Once you reach the midpoint, going back or forward takes the same effort, and the rewards forward are more exciting.

Explain also how this narrative help your brain buy the story

With that in mind, let’s get on with it!

Something

From https://www.harvardbusiness.org/what-makes-storytelling-so-effective-for-learning/

Stories about professional mistakes and what leaders learned from them are another great avenue for learning. Because people identify so closely with stories, imagining how they would have acted in similar circumstances, they’re able to work through situations in a way that’s risk free. The extra benefit for leaders: with a simple personal story they’ve conveyed underlying values, offered insight into the evolution of their own experience and knowledge, presented themselves as more approachable, AND most likely inspired others to want to know more.

Connection. Engagement. Appealing to all sorts of learners. Risk-free learning. Inspiring motivation. Conveying learning that sticks. It’s no wonder that more and more organizations are embracing storytelling as an effective way for their leaders to influence, inspire, and teach.

Another quote stories allow a person to feel and see the information as well as factually understand it … because you ‘hear’ the information factually visually and emotionally it is more likely to be imprinted on your brain in a way that it sticks with you longer with very little effort on your part. (Neuhauser 1993 p.4)