Why I Don’t Believe in Launching Without a Narrative

If you have ever launched a product and felt like something was missing, despite the deck being done, the emails being written, and the landing page being live, this post is for you.

I have launched many products. And I can say with confidence that the difference between a good launch and a great one often comes down to something that rarely shows up on the checklist.

A narrative.

I am not talking about taglines or hero copy. I am not talking about value props or bullet points on a one pager. I am talking about the full story that carries your audience from “I have a problem” to “This is the solution I have been looking for.”

Too often, teams race through launch prep without ever pausing to ask themselves:
What is the story we are actually telling?

Storytelling Is Not a Nice to Have

Product marketers are also storytellers. It can be easy to forget that when your week is filled with A/B testing subject lines, refining positioning docs, and fielding last minute requests.

But at some point in the process, you have to stop and zoom out.

You need to close your laptop, silence the calendar invites, and walk through your launch from the perspective of the person you are trying to reach.

What is their world like before they find your product?
What triggers them to go looking for help?
What questions do they have?
What do they hope is true about the solution they find?
And when they finally land on your homepage or hear about you from a colleague, what do they learn first? What impression do they leave with?

The “John” Test

Here is how I like to do it. I give the persona a name, John, for example, and walk through their journey in narrative form.

John works at a mid-sized company that is growing fast. He is running onboarding manually, juggling paperwork and tasks across tools. He does not realize how much time he is spending until a new hire has a terrible experience and he gets feedback from his manager.

Now John is searching for a better way. He starts Googling. He clicks on your ad. He scans the landing page. Something catches his eye. He reads more. He compares you to a competitor. He fills out a form. A rep reaches out.

And so on.

This is not about writing the perfect use case. It is about developing empathy. You are building a clear, narrative spine that stretches across every interaction, from ad to email to demo to handoff.

When you write the story out like this, you start to notice where the seams are weak. Where the messaging breaks. Where the tone shifts too fast. And where you are assuming the audience knows more than they do.

Narrative Is Not a Deliverable

One of the biggest reasons narrative gets left out of launch planning is that no one is officially asking for it.

You do not send it to the design team. You do not attach it to a Jira ticket. It does not have a due date.

But that does not mean it is optional.

I think of narrative as the connective tissue between the work. Without it, everything exists in isolation. Your emails say one thing. Your sales deck says another. Your product team frames things differently than your content team.

But when the narrative is clear, it shows up everywhere, even if no one notices it directly. It creates consistency. It creates clarity. And it helps your audience make sense of what you do and why it matters.

Go Beyond the First Impact

Strong narratives do not stop at the first win.

Software does X, so you get Y. That is how most messaging works. But real storytelling is about what happens after Y. What changes for the customer two or three steps later? What does your product enable that they were not expecting?

That is the part of the story that builds trust. That is the part that sets the tone for a long term relationship. And that is the part that usually only emerges when you take the time to step back and look at the full arc of the customer journey, not just the surface transactions.