It’s 5 p.m. on a Sunday.
Instead of relaxing, you’re playing Tetris with the roadmap. No time to enjoy a stroll or a nice book — you’ve got to finish adding that last thing you heard from sales.
If this sounds familiar, you’ve fallen into the trap that many product leaders have: the product conveyor belt.
Ask yourself:
- Are we consistently just adding to a backlog?
- Can the PMs on the team say no?
You’re on a treadmill that will never stop, and your team is dying a slow death. You’ve reinforced the dangerous conception that product managers are simply roadmap people. You’re telling the company, “Give us time, and we’ll deliver exactly this — and if we don’t, just scream louder until we do.”
But that’s not your reality, is it?
The remedy to all of this is to capitalize on tension to create clear, empowered and deliverable outcomes. You can do that with a product story.
A product story explains your role clearly. It defines your boundaries. It helps teams grasp the true nature and complexity of your work. Most importantly, it helps everyone understand why a product exists and what happens when that product succeeds.
In this post, I’ll show you exactly what a product story is and how to craft one. Even better, I’ll reveal how it can turn confusion into clarity, frustration into empowerment and burnout into genuine, meaningful delivery.
What Is a Product Story?
A product story defines the product team’s role, boundaries and focus. Built on clarity, empowerment and delivery, it aligns teams on the biggest problem to solve, grants PMs authority to make strategic trade-offs and showcases releases that advance company strategy.
Defining the ‘What Is Product?’ Problem
The uncomfortable truth is this: Most of your stakeholders genuinely don’t understand what your product team does.
Unlike sales (which sells), engineering (which builds) or operations (which maintains), product management is abstract, strategic and deeply collaborative. There’s no simple verb to capture what it does, and no universal output to point to.
This leads to what I call the “What is product?” problem: a persistent lack of shared understanding about the role, scope and authority of product management across the organization. Everyone sees the work, but no one agrees on what it is or why it matters.
Your PMs feel caught in the middle, squeezed by conflicting demands that need clarity. Meanwhile, everyone else fills in the blanks on what a product manager’s job actually is.
These aren’t just misunderstandings. They’re mixed metaphors for what you do:
- To sales, product is a waiter, there to take orders and deliver whatever they’re selling.
- To engineering, product is a translator, responsible for passing messages between teams.
- To executives, product is a project manager, responsible for hitting deadlines and keeping the trains running.
Every time stakeholders demand, “Just give us the roadmap,” they’re really saying, “Just tell us exactly what you’ll deliver and by when.” Without boundaries, you become whatever stakeholders project onto you. If you don’t define what product management is and why it matters, no one else will. Not your CEO, not sales and definitely not your PMs, who are just trying to survive in the fog of unclear expectations.
That clarity starts with you.
Your job is to tell the product story. That’s not just the roadmap, and it’s not just the backlog. You must do so clearly, consistently and often. Not just once in a slide deck. Not just in a team memo. Over and over, until everyone in the building knows what the product team really is and what it isn’t.
What Makes a Great Product Story?
Your product story isn’t just a mission statement or a fancy pitch. It’s an internal compass that guides your team and the entire organization toward clarity, empowerment and meaningful delivery.
Let’s break down exactly what these pillars mean and why each is essential:
Clarity
Clarity is the first and most critical pillar of a product story. It means knowing exactly what problem you’re solving, why it matters and what you’re saying no to. If your team is struggling with prioritization, you don’t have a prioritization problem. You have a clarity problem.
You’re likely trying to solve too many problems at once. You’re shuffling tasks, managing roadmaps and running sprint rituals, but no one can answer the core question: “What’s the biggest problem we’re here to solve?”
To answer that, start upstream.
Clarity comes from alignment with the business: the vision your executives are driving toward, and the strategy they’ve bet on to get there. Your job is to translate that strategy into one bold, solvable problem the product team can focus on over the next six to 18 months.
And it only happens through conversation. You need to put your hypothesis on the table. Say it out loud: “It seems like this is our biggest blocker to growth. Am I wrong? What am I missing?”
Stakeholders don’t expect you to have perfect answers. They expect you to initiate the right dialogue. They need to hear you say, “We’re a product team that’s focused on X problem.”
Empowerment
The second pillar, empowerment, is about giving product managers the authority — and letting them know that the expectation is — to make hard calls in the face of complexity.
Empowerment is the antidote to order-taking. But that starts with ownership, not with flair.
Every PM on your team should be able to say: “Here’s the problem I own, here’s why it matters, and here’s how I’m measuring progress.”
True empowerment shows up in the decisions they make and the tradeoffs they defend. Ask yourself: Do they say “no” and explain why?
“We’re prioritizing X because it directly supports the problem we’ve committed to solving. That means we’re not doing Y, even though it’s a good idea, because it doesn’t move the metric.”
You need to show that your teams are focused on this over that because of the problem that you’re trying to solve and how you’re trying to be different from our competitors.
Delivery
The third pillar is delivery. This isn’t the shallow “task completion” stakeholders may imagine. True delivery is about consistently making intelligent, strategic decisions that genuinely move your product (and company) forward. Can we talk about the latest release in a way that highlights whether we’re moving forward?
This arrives in organizations as a demo culture. Great demo culture means you’re going to demo your work on a regular basis. If you have large projects, this means you’ll need to change how you work and thin-slice your output. Don’t try to deliver the whole cake at once. Deliver a few powerful slices. Nothing should take longer than one workflow. The goal is to show momentum in a way that invites curiosity, feedback and clarity.
The delivery is a good opportunity to show stakeholders what’s happening and allow them to engage with the team. It creates positive conversation, like this: “Our last release was Y. And the way that it helped us move our strategy forward is Z.”
Telling the Story
Let’s recap the story structure:
- We’re a product team that’s focused on X problem.
- Our teams are focused on this over that because of the problem that we’re trying to solve and how we’re trying to be different from our competitors.
- Our last release was Y.
- And the way that it helped us move our strategy forward is Z.
If you make a slide, if you’re talking about this stuff over and over and over again, people will start to understand your story.
When your product story is clear, well-defined and fully embraced, everything begins to change. Stakeholders stop fixating solely on timelines and start understanding your decisions. Your product managers move beyond firefighting and begin proactively shaping strategy. Your team becomes empowered, trusted, and confident. You’ll notice fewer reactive meetings and less stakeholder shouting. Cross-functional conversations become clearer. Product managers start to feel energized rather than burned out.
Most importantly, your product team becomes seen as strategic leaders, not glorified project managers. Your product team deserves clarity. Your organization deserves empowered, strategic decisions. Your customers deserve real, meaningful delivery.
The best time to craft your product story was yesterday. The next best time? Right now.
Let’s get started.
