How Writing Fiction Can Improve Product Management Skills

Product management is a function of observation and storytelling, and so is fiction.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I tie most of my career progression back to my writing. There is obviously more than that to it. If I was not at least decent at my job, no amount of writing would overcome that deficiency. But at the same time, good writing can help surface and amplify your good work. It can make you better in many ways.

The bias here is real. I have been writing fiction since I was about 8 years old. I received my Master’s Degree in Creative Writing in 2017. My first book of fiction was published in 2020. Writing is kind of my thing. Despite the obvious bias, there’s clear indicators beyond my own experience that the ability to write—and specifically write fiction—can help in product development. I’ll share some background from my own career, but I’ll also share excerpts and info from others across the broader tech ecosystem.

Writing fiction unlocks possibilities. If you are someone who leans towards no as a default, try writing fiction. Allow your mind to expand beyond what you think is possible. While I have always tended to lean toward yes, I’ve recognized over the last 15 or so years that my idea of what’s possible has expanded significantly. This is not because I’m living in a fantasy world, it’s not because writing suddenly made the impossible possible. Instead, it’s the simple act of thinking widely through writing has unlocked areas of opportunity that I did not previously see or have access to.

Writing fiction introduces different perspectives. We live with a single perspective for most of our lives—our own. We’re influenced by other perspectives like those of our parents, siblings, friends, and others. But at the end of the day, we live with our one perspective. When writing fiction, you are required to explore different perspectives in a way that doesn’t just layer the perspective on top of your own like you experience when talking to other people whose view on things is different from yours. The process of writing and creating worlds and characters requires you to fundamentally replace your perspective with the perspective of the character you’re creating. This temporary shift is a little bit like working out. When lifting weights, you tear at your muscles, replacing what was there with something else entirely. Eventually, when you do this long enough, your entire body changes. The same is true with this perspective shift that comes from writing. The ability to experience different perspectives makes you a more empathetic person in general, and what’s the number one thing all product managers say is the key to success?

Say it with me now: EMPATHY

Before I took writing seriously, I think I was a generally closed-minded person. My perspective dominated and I didn’t care much to change. Couple this with being young, and I was clearly not equipped with the empathy needed back then to build successful products. While writing wasn’t the only tool that helped me get better at this, it was a big contributor. It was also an accelerant. The ability for me to adapt and feel different perspectives came to me much quicker because I was writing fiction.

Finally, the most important part of writing fiction is the ability to tell a story. Product management is storytelling. You might have the best roadmap in the world. You might write the best requirements documents. You might have the strongest product insights in the organizations. However, none of that will matter if you can’t convey your ideas in a way that pulls people in. Buy-in is a necessary component to product work no matter the size of the organization. Writing fiction forces you to tell a compelling story—assuming you want anyone to read it. That storytelling power can be extended to the stories you tell about your product. It’s not about explaining why a product or feature is necessary. It’s not even about pointing to metrics and showing how it will drive the bottom line. It’s about evoking emotion in others. Emotion leads to action.

Those are some themes I’ve observed when looking back on my career, but I’m not alone here. On a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast, Lenny interviewed Yuhki Yamashita, and Yuhki had this to say about storytelling:

People who work with me know that I often talk about storytelling. In fact, if you’ve ever reported to me, storytelling has come up in some sort of performance review. That’s how much I care about it.

Yuhki went on to say that storytelling is talked about a lot in product management and so he took it a level further by saying that the real power within storytelling is synthesis. The ability to distill ideas into a consumable format can supercharge a product manager no matter where they are in their career journey. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll notice Yuhki goes so far as to suggest that his own talent for storytelling and synthesis comes from literature classes where he wrote and studied fiction.

Evgeny Lazarenko, a technical PM who writes a great Substack called The Product Thinker, has an entire guide on product management and writing. I want to call out one specific section where he talks about writing for yourself. This aligns so neatly with writing fiction that I am going to quote the entire section.

You will hear this often: “know your audience”. While this advice works well for public speaking, it may lead you to a writing disaster. William Zinsser suggests a better, contrarian approach: you should always write for yourself.

Of course, that doesn’t mean completely ignoring the needs of your audience. Instead, that means allowing yourself to rely on your innate feel for language and understanding of context of whatever it is you’re trying to explain. This helps you craft a message that not only conveys information in with clarity, but does so without sacrificing your unique voice.

Few things are as boring as jargon-laden business documents devoid of style and life. While often sometimes efficient, business writing, and especially product management writing, is rarely memorable.

Your job as a product manager, however, is not only to provide information, but make it memorable and easy to recall, so that your colleagues could apply the new knowledge in their work.

The last paragraph is the killer. Make it memorable. This is what fiction writing is all about and this is how you can extend the skills of writing fiction into product management.

As a final example from outside the narrow world of me, we have Jens-Fabian Goetzmann (Head of Product at RevenueCat) who wrote an entire article on LinkedIn about how science fiction helps with product management. In this article, he says:

Product management fundamentally requires conjuring worlds that are not reality yet and then bringing them to life – whether that’s just about new features or entirely new products. This requires developing a vision of how things might be once the product comes into existence. It also in many case requires identifying assumptions that are generally held to be true and breaking them. Consider Airbnb, for example: “what if people didn’t stay in hotels, but in other people’s houses?”

This is the world building that product managers embark on.

This vision then needs to be made relatable by linking it with the experiences, needs, and problems that people face today. People need to be able to envision their role in relation to the vision and how they would act in the world of that vision.

That is the plot that product managers must come up with.

Writing helps in so many ways, it’s surprising to me that more people don’t work on this craft the same way they work on other career crafts. But that also means that if you do work on it, you have a better chance of standing out.

Even if you’re not writing fiction, write creatively. It will unlock so much. The power of creativity and storytelling is a clear theme throughout my personal experience and the experiences shared by others in the industry. Build worlds, experience different perspectives, synthesize information, and let the wonderful world of fiction drive improvements in your product management career.