A product is nothing more than an embodied story. If you don’t have a story you don’t have a product. If you can’t tell the story, you can’t fund the product, design the product, test the product, market the product or sell the product.
The product story takes many forms but a lot of the best ones go: group of humans want to do a thing, but that thing is hard/scary/expensive/risky because of this problem. Our product will/does make doing the thing easy/cheap/low-risk therefore group of humans can get what they want (and will give us money to get what they want).
When I tell the story I like to use the real details of the customers I observed having the problem in the course of my qualitative research (you are doing qualitative research as a PM right?) I talk about the pain point I saw, what it looked, smelled, tasted and felt like, what the weather was, what the consequences were for the humans involved. My goal is to make my audience feel the pain that the customers feel. If there is no pain, there is no product - go build something else. If you can’t tell the story, there is no way your sales and marketing teams will and the product will fail.
I practice my stories a lot - with my boss, with my stakeholders, with my sales and marketing teams, with my friends and family and I ask for blunt, brutal specific feedback: “what did you hear me say?”, “how could I have said that better?”, “what rang false or hollow “, “Did I use any jargon you don’t think customers will get” and most important “what do you think the customers feel about the pain point”
This takes a stupid amount of work to get right. I recently gave a 10 min talk at a customer confrence. By the time walked in stage I had over 100 hours of writing, editing, practice and prep into that talk - but the customers reaction to that talk sold my sales and marketing teams on the product and gave them the stories and language they needed to go sell.
To get better at story telling focus on the people and their pain - that’s the plot. If you need examples of how words create emotion you can study master short story tellers: Hemingway, Chekov, Conrad, Dhal … Study cognitive bias, behavioral economics, but most importantly practice. If you can pitch your idea, tell your story to just one customer a week and reflect and iterate
after each, you’ll be much better very soon.