Stories create change where facts fail

Our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart or facts or statistics or platitudes or ideas that are not attached to imagery. So the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten. 100%. You will be forgotten.

Good story is not about facts. It's about creating emotional engagement. It's about creating the sense that the listener would like to be part of this story.

When we talk about change, change has a great universal appeal. So you might not be a teacher who's trying to teach someone to find confidence in their life, but you might be a person who once lacked confidence and then found confidence. When we do change, when we're focused in on that change, we increase exponentially the universal appeal to the story and our ability to connect to an audience.

I often talk about memification, which is this idea that I found this out most at Uber, I feel, where there's certain insights, data insights, research insights that were memmified to the point where someone like Travis or Dara would just cite this insight in the middle of a meeting, and you know that you've really done your job as, maybe, a researcher or a data scientist or product manager if people are able to do that and draw from that in that way.

A story is only as good as the action that it's capable of driving. We're living in a world where everyone is constantly distracted, and you get these 30 seconds of attention at a time. The ability to really tell something powerful that sticks is really important.

Travis Kalanick and Dara Khosrowshahi are former and current CEOs of Uber, respectively, where Yamashita worked as a product leader.

I often talk about memification - there are certain insights that were memified to the point where someone like Travis or Dara would just cite this insight in the middle of a meeting. You know you've really done your job as a PM if people are able to do that.

Really make sure that you're using language that speaks to the heart and the minds of the people because we constantly tend to use too much of our business lingo and it's banner blindness... Maybe you can find something simpler and say, 'We need to learn something about this particular thing,'