The magical art of storytelling

Fatima Sarah Khalid: So when I was little, my father used to tell me stories about this little squirrel, called Good Goody, and Goody for short. And every night after dinner, we would sit together, and he would tell me these stories about this little squirrel and her adventures with her animal friends. And Goody was this combination of the character that my father would voice. Like, he would look away from me and make the sounds, but also a role model that used to teach me certain things. She would invite her friends, these two cats, Tutu and Min Min, and they'd go around helping all of these other animals in the forest.

And she lived beyond those stories in the evening. She reappeared in moments when I was trying to negotiate more TV time or when I was at my friend's house and I would say, hey, dad. I don't wanna talk to you. I wanna talk to Goody. And where's Goody?

And my dad would turn away his face, and he would respond to me in this character voice where he'd be like, Goody's here too, and Goody says you have thirty more minutes. And as a child, I always knew that that was my father's voice. And sometimes I'd imitate it or run around and try to catch him in the act while he was making the sound. But even though I knew that Goody was an extension of my father, it always delighted me, and I was always excited to hear those stories. And from as early as nine years old, I started telling those stories to my niece.

And my father and I dreamed about putting these stories together in a children's book so that my nieces could read them when they were older as well. But there was something magical about these stories, and as I reflected on giving this talk, I thought a lot about what it was that made these stories so powerful and the ways in which I continue to use that magic that I can share with all of you. So what makes a great story that lifts you from reality and takes you on an adventure? And how do we use that magic as DevRel professionals? How do we take that magic and make it a part of the stories and the experiences that we share?

The first thing I learned about great stories is that they're relatable. The best stories have characters that we can connect with, real humans with real challenges and experiences. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to fight over which character we wanted to be in TV shows. And as a result, I still read books thinking, wow. This girl is really adventurous, but she's so bold, and I can aspire to be like that.

People wanna see themselves in stories. They wanna see themselves be able to share the experience that a character is going through. So when an opportunity or challenge presents itself, they're invested in the results. And whether that leads them to trying out your product demo or rolling out their sleeves and doing some community work, that's something you have the power to do and inspire them to do. Great stories also have trajectory, a clear beginning, middle, and end.

In many cases, there's also a hook. That's what keeps you interested and some kind of payoff at the end that feels fulfilling as a resolution. It's important to know the sequence of events in your story even if you don't narrate them in order and even if the story trajectory isn't traditional or you leave the ending open ended. It's your creative spin that will make this unique. And finally, great stories move people to action.

Several years ago, I was sitting in a conference room in Toronto, and our director of comms, Luke Simcoe, described great stories as things that move people to action. And it changed the way I structured my presentations and made me really think about impact. It's so wonderful to put your stories out into the world, but the real challenge is figuring out what you want your audience to take away. The process for creating a story and adding it to your presentations can look different for different people. But at a high level, this is what my process looks like.

And today, I'd like to focus on what I think are the two core pieces, identifying the different elements of your story and then crafting a narrative around it that works and brings your audience on a journey. For me, the first important thing is to identify the box that I'm in before I start getting creative and think outside the box. This is where I like to know what the limitations are. If this is chemistry, I'd tell you what the limiting reagents are for the reaction. So if this is a talk you've already submitted or if it's a new talk, you have to decide how much time you have to deliver to the talk.

It's also important to consider the conference theme, the track, and the time slot that you're presenting it to. The second thing I like to develop is something I call the story profile. In journalism, a profile story is a written portrait of a person. It explores the background and character of a particular person and focuses on a specific theme or achievement or project in their life. It's not just a bunch of facts in chronological order.

It should add up to something more than the sum of its parts. So I like to use that journalistic inquiry to put together a story profile. Especially when these stories are coming from personal experience, it can be really hard to be concise or edit them or cut them short. And at this stage, it's helpful to recognize that if you're using a personal story for a professional presentation, it's not gonna be the same story that you tell your friends at brunch. There is different type of delivery, a different point that you're making, and you might have to edit it down to fit your narrative.

The hardest thing for me is really narrowing down these stories. I wanna tell all of them all the time. And so one of the things that I do is, an idea that's inspired from fiction writing snowflake method, where you start with a simple idea and then build on it as it transforms from a single sentence to a full novel. And so the first thing I like to do is, how can I summarize my talk in one sentence? This is really, really hard, and it helps me build out what the core message of my talk is and then build the tech, the deck, the assets, the trajectory around that.

And as you're thinking about more specific elements, you know, who is your main character? What's the situation that will change? Who is impacted or improved? And what was that journey to that improvement? Sometimes this is a series of fill in the blanks.

This deserves its own slide because it's something that I'm still working on getting better at. So knowing your audience will really depend on the venue of your talk, but also, like, how you deliver talks best and what kind of structures fit into your tone, expertise, and style. It's possible to get some of this information ahead of time. You could ask conference organizers. You could look at what people talked about in the past.

It's kinda like doing recon for your talk. Find out what they already know. Find out what they care about. Look at what they talked about last year, and then figure out what their pain points are and what they would find most valuable. And finally, my favorite part is the scaffold or structure of your story.

How do you wanna share this experience with your audience? If you're already a speaker, chances are that you have a few go to structures for your talks, depending on the type of talks you're giving or the themes. If you're exploring new styles, I highly recommend looking into frameworks for writing fiction. A lot of them are highly applicable to talks in tech and can change depending on the type of talk that you're doing. I share some articles with you at the end of this talk.

One of the things that's really been helpful for me when thinking about sharing stories is how do you wanna show, not tell your story? This clarification really helps me realize that you have to share your experiences in a certain way that you provide just enough information for your audience, but not too much, and you allow them to discover and come to certain conclusions on their own. An analogous experience to this is when you're mentoring someone, and you do that thing where you sit on your hands and you point them in the right direction, and then you wait. Even if it's a really long time, you wait for them to figure out the solution to the problem that they're facing. In doing some research, I discovered Nancy Duarte and her book resonate in which she describes how to use the power of stories to deliver great presentations.

She develops this structure called sparklines. It's a technique for storytelling among many, many, many. But at its core, sparklines is about contrasting the real world with what the real world could be. And I thought it was pretty cool because all of the ways that I've picked up storytelling from mentors of mine or speakers that I really look up to, it maps really closely to this structure. And so I thought I would share this with you and how I put together talks based on this structure.

In more detail, Sparklines is about placing the different pieces of the story profile that we put together in a sequence that takes the audience on a journey. So we start with a call to adventure with a character and the situation to the details and the opportunity of how that situation can be improved. And, ultimately, that leads to some kind of call to action, whether that's moving forward to what a future could look like or a product that solves this person's dilemma or solution. Presentations that follow a sparkling structure are known to be, like, hopeful and motivating because they're overlaying, like, the present with what could be and then providing, like, a path forward to move towards that exciting future. I naturally really like sparkling because it allows me to bring my cheerful present personality to technical product demos.

And so this is kind of where I live most of the time because it it's a great merger, of the things that I'm good at. So storytelling is great, but I bet many of you are thinking, well, I can't always bring my personal stories or photos of my niece to professional talks. So how do I deliver an engaging product demo for my organization that also has a compelling story? And so what I'm gonna share with you is kind of a fill in the blanks that I threw together is a little bit of how I approach product demos, and storytelling in my organization. So assuming that the goal of the demo is increasing adoption, we'd like to summarize the topic or goal in a giant sentence with some elements from the story profile that we put together, so a character and a situation to drive the narrative.

You ready? Let's go. So this talk is about that one sentence summary that you put together, and the character has a name. I tend to always use the name Geraldine because I think it's cool, but you should also give them a photo and some background about where they're from. And they discover some situation.

Maybe it's a problem. Maybe it's something that they're facing. Maybe it's an organization that's looking for support on something. And there's an opportunity to break that situation better through your product demo or your feature or new offering that you're putting out. And then you have to explain how that experience is improved through data or examples or demos or live demos, and that's really the core of where you're gonna show what your product does and how it works.

And finally, how the audience can get started using that product. I think it's really important to bring it back to that call to action to be like, here you go. Here's the thing that solves the problem that you can relate with. Now go ahead and have fun with it. So this is just a template, and I wanted to show you a quick look at what this looks like in practice.

Also, I need water. Two weeks ago at Pantheon, we had this internal hackathon, and it has something called a vision category where you can share project ideas for the future. So it's very in line with Sparklines now that now that I'm making that connection. So my team and I won a prize pitching an idea for something we call Pantheon Labs, and I wanted to share that with you at a super high level how we built out Scaffold for our story using the Sparklines method. So we start out at the beginning with our character.

So Geraldine is this web developer at Metis University, and they're evaluating the Pantheon platform to see if autopilot, one of our features, would make their updates easier. Now there's no real way for them to get started with a demo. There's no way to spin up Autopilot and see it working on a site without talking to sales first. And I'm sure we can all imagine that that's not always the great place to get started. So our team asked ourselves, how can we make this experience better?

I think this is always a really great question when you're using a sparklines type demo because you really want the audience to feel like, oh, right. How can we make this experience feel better? And then slowly provide them the answer so that they can come to their own conclusion. And that's where we introduce Pantheon Labs. It's this learning playground where you can spin up different features and environments and start testing them in the cloud.

And it can be built using existing tools. So here's what we already have. This is the reality. But it can also develop collaboration with existing projects and docs and sales. And so that's kind of like the reality is we have a couple of tools that we can use to build labs, and the exciting future is all of the ways that we can move forward other projects as well as this one to succeed.

And, ultimately, Pantheon would allow Pantheon Labs would allow customers to have hands on experiences with the offerings and new features and integrations, which increases feature adoption and time to value. So this is kind of the, like, trajectory of our talk. Given this, I do have to say Pantheon Labs is not an official offering, so don't go asking for it. This was just an idea that we came up with and happened to win one of the vision prizes. And so this is how I put together talks for specific product demos, knowing that the audience is a mix of technical and nontechnical.

So we have stakeholders, but we also have people from other teams that may not understand, like, build scripts and more technical things like that. And so this was a really fun talk to put together. And one of my coworkers earlier today was like, I need to know how the magic happened behind Pantheon Labs presentation. And I was like, well, I have the perfect talk to deliver that in. So thank you, John, for inspiring me to to do this walk there.

Finally, if there's one last thing that I can impart to you, it's that I think that we are all storytellers. I'm sure that you grew up around someone who was the light of every conversation. You know? That person that everyone leaned into and eagerly listened to when they were speaking. For me, that person was always my father.

He had this, like, don't know what it is, ability to captivate audiences. And it's been two years since he left this world. But today, I feel really happy and hopeful that I can pass on a small part of his legacy, small part of the stories I listened to as a kid about Good Goody to You. And I think, ultimately, stories are about sharing parts of ourselves with the world. And it's this journey of learning to, like, find, capture, and release those magical feelings that we have into words that other people can relate to and understand and follow.

And so I wish you all the best on your journeys of storytelling, and I look forward to hearing them as well. Thank you so much.