Product storytelling, Jurassic Park style.

128 minutes of non-stop, engrossing action.

Once you’ve seen it, you never forget it.?Jurassic Park?stays with you. It’s a movie that you watch, on the edge of your seat, although you know the plot and the ending: island paradise, stranded humans, cunning dinosaurs running amok, dinosaurs hunting humans, humans escaping narrowly, humans bonding under stressful circumstances, humans escaping again, hungry dinosaurs left behind.

Jurassic Park's takeaways can influence your product storytelling.

Promise dinosaurs in the title.

What lures you into?Jurassic Park??Dinosaurs. The movie title screams dinosaurs. The movie title combines two words whose juxtaposition is startling, because they don’t have much to do with each other and you’ve never heard these words uttered together—the word “Jurassic” next to the innocuous word, “Park.” The title is short, direct, and memorable. The title stirs your imagination as it evokes dinosaurs roaming inside a park, perhaps alongside humans. You haven’t seen this park yet, but you’re here for the ride.

Takeaways for your product storytelling:

• Keep the title of your talk short, direct, and memorable.
• Juxtapose words that are rarely used together, to make the title interesting.
• Use a unique proper noun for your product, system, approach, solution.

Build up the suspense.

Jurassic Park?opens with humans who are paleontologists. Minutes into the movie, these paleontologists are confessing their personal stories, dropping casual scientific facts about dinosaurs into their breakfast-table chatter. You're yet to see a single dinosaur, but you?feel?they are coming. You see iconic images that are burned into your brain, such as the gates of Jurassic Park lit up by flickering torches, the massive wooden doors swinging open to reveal a road that seems endless. You’re impatient and eager to see the dinosaurs, but you’re reveling in the build-up, drinking in new facts and learning more. The fact that you don’t see the dinosaurs (that you came for) several minutes into the movie, builds suspense. When the dinosaurs do show up, it’s a glorious, dramatic, a-ha moment with the right music and impactful scenery. The audience’s glimpse of that first dinosaur, a brachiosaurus, is a?big?deal in the movie. It’s magical.

Takeaways for your product storytelling:

• Build up your product. Introduce the characters (the problems you are solving), and introduce key locations (set the scene, talk about the artifacts).
• Use visuals that are powerful and that resonate with the audience. The right images don’t need explanation or text, but they help the audience recall your talk. Use text as sparingly as salt. Use visuals, diagrams, or use the fantastic digital photos that are available on Unsplash, Pixabay, and other online sites, Don’t forget to credit the photographer and to read the terms of use.
• Build up to your first big reveal, your a-ha moment. String the audience along for a bit, keep dropping new facts, keep them intrigued. Build up the suspense towards the magic.
• Make your a-ha moment pack a punch. In a movie, dramatic music does the trick. In a talk, your tone, the inflections in your speech, the flourishes of your hands, the animations in your slides, your energy, and your enthusiasm, all have the same impact. Sometimes, a dramatic pause says everything. Your audience needs to feel that this moment is a big, big deal to you, as it should be to them.

Sequence dinosaur encounters.

After the first dinosaur shows up in?Jurassic Park, the movie is loaded with problem after problem—there’s a thunderstorm, the power goes out, the roads are muddy, the characters get separated from each other, and, yes, there are villains. The dinosaurs keep coming. In more flavors than before.

You're treated to a back-to-back sequence of heart-pounding, tense dinosaur encounters. The characters narrowly escape being eaten by an angry dinosaur, only to run into another one. A thundering T-Rex chases a Jeep in the rain. A herd of velociraptors, working together in an eerie human-like way, tries to hunt down humans hiding in a kitchen. This roller-coaster of escapades forms the bulk of the movie: dinosaur chases humans (problem), humans escape (solution), a different dinosaur chases humans (problem), humans escape again (solution), over and over again. Every escapade is set in a different location, with a different dinosaur, different humans, a different chase, and a different escape.

Each new dinosaur appears worse than the last—hungrier, nastier, more ferocious, and more relentless. You gasp at the cunning of the dinosaurs but you marvel at the resourcefulness of the humans. You know the formula for each escapade by now, but you can’t look away. Not now.

Takeaways for your talk:

• Introduce the problem you’re working on as a story. It has to be bold, striking, and big. This is your equivalent of the “ravenous dinosaurs on the loose, wanting to gobble up humans” problem.
• Your talk now becomes a narrative of stories—smaller problems, along with their solutions. Think of each problem as an isolated dinosaur encounter.
• String the problems together in a way that they make sense, that they build up, with the more complex problems towards the end. Think of how each dinosaur encounter is worse than the previous one.
• Use the formula of a problem-solution-problem-solution-problem-solution sequence so that the audience gets bits of relief in between the problems, but gets familiar with your thought process. Just as the movie characters get to catch their breath in between the adrenalin-charged dinosaur encounters, give your audience that chance to exhale a small sigh of relief every time you solve a problem, before you charge headlong into the next problem.
• Don't hold back the pace. Once you escape the first dinosaur, let the audience breathe for a couple of minutes, but cue up the next dinosaur. Don't let there be too much relief after you present each solution. Trot out the next problem.
• Help the audience fall in love with the problem. The movie audience loves the mean dinosaurs as much as the scrappy humans. Secretly, they root for both.
• Share the unforgettable, little details that draw the audience in and make them remember your story. Little details set you apart. Even the failures and the fears. The quivering jello on the teaspoon held by the little girl in Jurassic Park is burned into our brains. Share your quivering-jello moments.

Provide closure with the final escape.

Jurassic Park?is a science-fiction adventure film. You know how it will end—the central characters will escape, the dinosaurs will be thwarted, the humans will have had an unforgettable adventure, friendships will be formed, life will go on. You walk away satisfied, feeling that you got your money’s worth. You have a sense of closure: you came for the dinosaurs and you saw them (check), you learnt something new about dinosaurs (check), your imagination is fired up (check), you got to see some heart-pounding dinosaur chases (check), you got to see feel-good escapes and rescues (check), and you’re intrigued enough to want to learn more on your own (check).

Most of all, you're ready to line up for the sequel. You want more.

Jurassic Park?made amateur paleontologists of its audience. The audience walked out, continuing to name-drop velociraptors, triceratops, gallimimus, brachiosaurus, dinosaur anatomy, dinosaur food habits, dinosaur sounds, dinosaur poop (coprolite, if you want to look it up). The audience started to incorporate dinosaurs into their breakfast-table chatter, their water-cooler chatter, their class-room chatter.

Takeaways for your talk:

• Give your audience a sense of closure. As you wind down your talk, help them feel that you solved the problems in a tidy fashion. The final escape needs to feel good. The story needs to feel complete.
• Make a check-list of the vocabulary you want your audience to have learnt from your talk, the key punch-lines, and walk through those terms without making it too check-list-y.
• Make the audience become a bit more of an expert, as they walk out. Share surprising insider facts and unique lessons learned that come from your first-hand experience in doing the work.
• Fire up the audience’s imagination, and make them want to learn more about your line of work.

Leave loose ends for a sequel.

Loose ends serve a purpose. Unfinished business serves a purpose.

In the closing scenes of?Jurassic Park, the nomad T-rex makes a surprise reappearance for one last encounter with the humans. As the good humans make their final escape from the Park, the T-rex is showing standing, roaring in his kingdom, in the ruins of the Park visitor center. The T-rex appears robbed of its satisfaction, as the humans escape, but he's got his kingdom back.

What a powerful, dramatic ending. Not only are the good guys alive, but so are the dinosaurs. These dinosaurs just won’t quit. They demand satisfaction. They are raring to go for a future encounter. Secretly, you root for them, too. This moment sets up the possibility of a sequel. Maybe some of the humans return to the Park years later? Maybe the dinosaurs escape from the Park and enter into the city? Maybe, just maybe, those heart-pounding T-rex car chases again?

Takeaways for your talk:

• Leave the audience with a sense of unfinished business. Make sure that they know you'll never stop, you cannot stop, you won't stop, there is work to be done, and you're raring to go.
• Fire up the audience’s imagination with where you could take this work next. The best talks are where the audience imagines the sequel before you do.
• Talk about the loose ends, and talk about them with confidence. The audience should feel that you are the best-equipped person to dream up the sequel, and they should ask, "When? When? When?"

Jurassic Park?is a movie, a work of fiction. It is not a scientific documentary, nor does it claim to be one. A product talk, on the other hand, is a presentation that should be grounded in fact, not fiction. What is important to learn from?Jurassic Park, though, is how its story unfolds, and how the audience stays with it.

Jurassic Park?maintains anticipation and excitement for a whopping 128 minutes. That's remarkable. At the end, the audience is left emotionally drained, but fully alive, with a sense of wonder (I’ve never seen a movie like this before), a sense of happiness (The humans escaped, thank goodness), and a sense of anticipation (What will that escaped T-rex do next?).

30 years later,?Jurassic Park?still educates, captivates, terrifies, and inspires.?You learn a little bit more, every time you re-watch the movie. You're a bit more awe-struck every time. Jurassic Park?feels satisfying, from start to finish. It?delivers.

And?that?is worth copying.