Recently, I came across an open role at Miro titled Head of Storytelling. At first glance, it might look like a rebranding of an existing marketing or communications role. But the more time I spent with the description, the clearer it became that something more fundamental is happening.

This role isn’t just about content, brand campaigns, or communications execution. It reflects a deeper shift in how organisations are starting to think about storytelling — not as a creative output, but as a strategic capability.

And that shift is worth paying attention to.

Traditionally, storytelling in organisations has been fragmented. Brand teams handle positioning. Product teams focus on features. Marketing translates both into campaigns. Sales adapts the message again for the pitch. Leadership adds a different layer for investors or press.

Individually, each function is doing reasonable work. Collectively, the story often falls apart.

What roles like Head of Storytelling attempt to address is not a lack of content, but a lack of narrative ownership. Someone senior enough, and close enough to strategy, to be accountable for the through-line that connects product vision, customer value, and company direction.

In the case of Miro, the remit spans brand, content, social, PR, and influencer strategy. That breadth matters. It signals that storytelling is no longer being treated as a channel-specific activity, but as a connective tissue across the organisation.

This role didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s a response to a set of pressures that many product-led companies are experiencing at the same time.

As software products mature, they tend to become broader and more modular. What started as a simple tool becomes a platform. A platform becomes a suite. A suite becomes an ecosystem.

At that point, listing features stops being helpful. Customers don’t struggle because the product lacks capability; they struggle because they can’t clearly see what the product is for or how it fits into their world.

Storytelling becomes the mechanism for restoring clarity — not by simplifying the product, but by structuring how its value is explained.

AI has dramatically lowered the cost of producing content. Blogs, social posts, landing pages, even videos can now be generated at speed.

But this abundance has exposed a different bottleneck. Most companies aren’t struggling to produce content. They’re struggling to produce coherent meaning.

When execution is easy, differentiation moves upstream. The real advantage lies in having a clear narrative that guides what gets created in the first place. That’s not something you solve with more tools or more output. It requires deliberate thinking.

For years, storytelling was treated as a skill — something great marketers or writers were good at. Increasingly, it’s being recognised as a leadership responsibility.

When storytelling isn’t aligned at a strategic level, the organisation feels it everywhere: inconsistent messaging, confused customers, misaligned teams, and products that struggle to explain their own value.

A Head of Storytelling role exists to prevent that drift. Not by controlling every word, but by setting the narrative foundations others can build on.

Stripped back to its essence, the Head of Storytelling role is responsible for answering and aligning around a few fundamental questions:

These aren’t marketing questions in the narrow sense. They’re strategic questions that shape everything from product decisions to go-to-market execution.

The role sits at the intersection of product, brand, and business strategy — translating complexity into clarity, and ambition into something people can actually understand and repeat.

This is where the role strongly overlaps with the work I’ve been doing around product storytelling.

In most organisations, the weakest story isn’t the brand story or the campaign story. It’s the product story. The explanation of what the product truly does for people, how it changes their situation, and why it’s the right choice in a crowded market.

When that story is unclear, no amount of creative execution can compensate for it. Messaging becomes vague. Value propositions drift. Teams fill the gaps with their own interpretations.

Product storytelling treats this as a solvable problem. It gives teams a structured way to articulate value, connect it to real customer conflict, and anchor it in credibility. Not as a one-off exercise, but as a shared language across the organisation.

What roles like Head of Storytelling signal is that companies are starting to recognise the cost of not doing this work properly.

The most interesting thing about the Miro role isn’t whether they fill it successfully. It’s that the role exists at all.

It suggests we’re moving toward a world where storytelling is no longer something companies hope emerges organically, or outsource to individual teams. Instead, it becomes something they design intentionally, stewarded by someone whose job is to think about narrative at the same level as strategy and structure.

In an environment saturated with content, clarity becomes a competitive advantage. And clarity, more often than not, is the result of good storytelling.

Not louder stories. Not prettier ones.

Clearer ones.

Storytelling is a skill. Like any skill, it can be broken down, studied, and mastered. The April and September editions are now open for enrollment for the product storytelling Cohort. Designed to help you discover, define, and deliver a unique product narrative.

Our first cohort of alumni has just finished. You can read their feedback on their experience and learnings with the link below.

Good luck creating stories.

Elliott

Learn more about the Product Storytelling Cohort here and sign up while the limited seats are available!