Building a Strategic Narrative: The Power of Good Storytelling to Ignite Growth

Katana Cloud Inventory was ready to evolve. To stay ahead in a competitive landscape, the company needed a clear direction that could unify teams and drive product innovation.

And Anneli Tuisk, Head of Product at Katana, was tasked with delivering a product that could ignite that growth. 

In January 2024, Anneli started with crafting a strong Product Vision—one that could align teams, foster motivation, and inspire action across the company. A compelling Product Vision is more than just a guiding document; it is a story that captures the imagination and wins the hearts and minds of people.

Anneli chose to use Andy Raskin’s Strategic Narrative framework as it weaves together storytelling elements, strategic insights, and a strong Product Vision for where they wanted to go. To craft the Strategic Narrative, Anneli pulled together a cross-functional team and invited everyone to the company’s main office in Tallinn, Estonia.  Some people even flew in to be there in person for a day-long workshop.  They put away all their laptops and computers and worked with pens and post-it notes. 

The Strategic Narrative framework provides a structured approach consisting of six steps: Shift, Urgent, Future, Obstacles, Gifts, and Outcomes.

1.      Identifying the Shift: A big change from old game to new already arrived.  

 The first step in crafting the Strategic Narrative is recognizing that things have changed in the market already. It’s like Andy Raskin says: “The strategic narrative is not about how the company will change the world, but how the company will help buyers win in a world that already changed.”

A Strategic Shift is a big change in demand or technology that the company does not control – it lies outside the control of not only their company but of any one organization.  It is the sum total of lots of trends and advances in technology and society coming together to change things for the consumer.  Some examples of shifts are below. And note: this list is not all encompassing, but rather some starting inspiration points for your team. 

And these big seismic shifts do not happen every year and cannot be forced open with incentives or management tricks.   A shift is not that you did a reorg or acquired a company or bought a new software.  Strategic shifts have to be big enough to flatten all your competitor’s defensive moats. 

Katana looked at a couple of places for inspiration to identify the strategic shifts that were impacting their own customers.  They looked not only at the challenges they knew about from their own customer conversations, but also looked to examples of what other companies faced: For example, Borders versus Amazon. Nokia versus smartphone makers.  Katana also examined various market forces and emerging trends that were reshaping the landscape for their customers. After analyzing both customer feedback and broader industry patterns, the team identified several transformative shifts that were influencing buying decisions and operational strategies.

2.     Creating Urgency: Stakes are high with big winners and losers

With the Shift identified, Anneli moved to the next step: establishing urgency.  It is crucial for teams to understand that high stakes accompany these shifts - there are significant winners and losers in this evolving landscape.  

And urgency makes a powerful motivator for action.  The climate crisis serves as a poignant illustration—slow-moving disasters often fail to inspire immediate change, while pressing issues demand swift responses.

3.     Envisioning the Future:  A tease of an ultimate promised land.

The next step is to create a teaser of what the future could look like – in other words, what the future desired customer experience is. This is the heart of the strong Product Vision.

 Before the workshop, as homework, they started with a technique called Future Customer Letters. Similar to Amazon’s working background technique, the team imagines what a future happy customer would write to tell the company how their life has improved since using this product. (For more on this technique, see here).

 Anneli’s asked 22 stakeholders inside Katana to write a Future Customer Letter in preparation for the workshop.  However, as so often happens, the world changed before she could run her workshop.  The management team got so excited by the letters that they went ahead and crafted a mission and vision statement on their own. 

Anneli embraced this enthusiasm and pivoted her workshop focus from defining the vision to developing a narrative around it.  For a Product Vision to really deliver on all the benefits of alignment and motivation, it really needs to have a strong fleshed out storyline that will win hearts and minds. 

 The journey to a compelling product vision is rarely straightforward.  During Katana's workshop, the team struggled to craft a narrative that resonated. The group came up with some future narratives, but at the end of the workshop, they couldn't actually agree on something.  Everything they had felt weak and not very sticky.  

They realized that needed more customer insight. 

So the team paused the workshop and dug into Customer Discovery mode.  They were able to move forward with the help of two initiatives:

 1.  To gain deeper insights, Anneli conducted an analysis of around 100 recent won-lost deals, focusing on cases where product gaps influenced the outcome. This review provided some new perspectives on evolving customer needs and highlighted areas where Katana could enhance its offering to better serve a growing segment of the market. The analysis, aided by AI, was extensive—if done continuously, it could have taken about four weeks. However, with her ongoing responsibilities, Anneli had to fit this work around her “day job,” ultimately extending the process to ensure the final report was clear and actionable for the company.

2.  At the same time, Katana’s marketing team was conducting their own discovery work and noticed evolving patterns in customer engagement. This revealed new opportunities, but also highlighted areas where customer needs were becoming more complex and diverse. Addressing these insights required a fresh look at how Katana could refine and expand its offerings to stay aligned with market demands.

In response to these insights, Katana refined its understanding of the Ideal Customer Profile, adjusting its focus to better align with emerging market needs. 

4.     Overcoming Obstacles: The Pain Points where the customer is unhappy

The learnings from both the marketing team’s ICP discovery and the lost deals analysis had big impacts for the Product Vision.  Now they understood the customer’s real pain points. 

While Katana initially believed that addressing certain feature requests would meet customer needs, deeper analysis revealed a more complex reality.  Katana discovered that as businesses grew and expanded, their operational environments became increasingly intricate. Managing workflows across multiple locations, handling diverse supply chains, and coordinating sales activities became pain points.

It wasn’t just about adding new features—gaps existed that required a broader, more holistic approach to better serve evolving customer requirements.

5.     Recognizing Gifts: Capabilities to overcome promise land obstacles

With all these elements in place, the team synthesized the findings into a cohesive narrative that articulated Katana's future promise: "Katana can bring people and products together everywhere.”  Companies want real-time visibility across all their locations and Katana could deliver this.  Katana can bring people and products together everywhere to deliver the real-time visibility across all their locations. 

6.     Demonstrating Outcomes: Evidence you can make the story come true.

Anneli examined proven success cases from satisfied Katana customers and conducted a deep dive to uncover the key factors driving success. She identified tangible benefits that users experienced, offering valuable insights into what resonated most with Katana’s audience.

This evidence served as powerful reinforcement for their narrative—the promise land was not just an abstract concept but an achievable reality.

Unlocking Growth with a Stong Product Vision:

People sometimes say, oh you know, do this one thing, this silver bullet and you will grow. 

No.  If it would be so easy, then everyone would be growing rapidly. 

Katana needed to build its own formula for growth. 

Katana took their Product Vision and started to prioritize what actions to take first on their way to delivering it.  This process not only provided direction for the product team, making prioritization discussions much easier.  It also fostered alignment across departments. 

They used an approach known as Value Stacking (see here for more on this).  In short, when you value stack, each action unlocks something else.  And then when they do that newly unlocked thing, this will unlock the next thing.

They needed to figure out the puzzle pieces for their specific market and product and customer and company. Growth is not merely about executing one-off initiatives but rather about orchestrating multiple interconnected activities across departments. 

As organizations strive for growth in ever-evolving markets, investing time in understanding customers' realities will yield dividends far beyond initial expectations.  It can create momentum, alignment, and the ability to deliver the right pieces at the right time.