Stories are how humans have coordinated since time immemorial. Before money, law, or “we are family” companies of any kind, a shared narrative was the only way to get strangers to believe in and work toward something none of them could see. It still is. We still use stories to compress the world, as well as our ideas, world views and beliefs, into something that can be carried forward and acted on.
Right now, the tech world has been doubling down on this ancient technology. Storytelling and narrative functions have curiously begun showing up on org charts at some well-loved and obscure companies, big and small. When you start to see a new title for what seems like old work, it’s usually a signal that something about the work, or its returns, has changed.
Formalising what was latent
The crux of this story is still the same as it has been for all these years: people want others to give a shit about what they’re building. The function of storytelling has almost always been to influence something, whether that’s capital investments, team behaviour, even outputs in a reflexive kind of way.
I think the shift we’re seeing now is that narrative has become enough of a differentiator that companies see fit to formalise what was always latent. A new title or function is usually a lagging indicator that the marginal returns to a function have jumped. Look at design, for example: while it was always around, it took pivoting to mobile-first interface design for it to become a competitive bottleneck that needed to be elevated all the way to the top.
There are quite a few reasons I can see for this shift to have happened at this moment.
For one, software has become commoditised and features are much easier to clone especially with AI, so the technical moat that once did the differentiating has all but dried out. Companies doing work at the frontiers, on the other hand, have no precedents to learn from and no categories to contend with, and so theirs is a narrative challenge of a completely different order.
Second, there’s a growing gap between technical complexity and the need to explain what companies are building to increasingly diverse audiences. Investors, regulators, candidates, and users all consume the story simultaneously, so there’s a need to cater to all of them.
On top of that, there’s a need to tell more expansive stories that situate a company in a larger ecosystem, or even at the beginning of one that they’re the scriptwriters of. Journalists used to tell those stories, but traditional media has shrunk and become increasingly fragmented, leaving founders to take matters into their own hands. The public has also been largely in favour of this, migrating en masse to founders themselves on X, Substack, and podcasts like Dwarkesh’s.
Above all, narrative is more and more becoming the pricing mechanism for capital. Valuations aren’t as anchored to fundamentals as they used to be, especially given the end state of technology (especially AI) is genuinely unknowable. Unknowables also need people who are adept at making illegible things legible, so people put more stock in the narrative, because it’s the most likely way to compress uncertainty into enough conviction to convince investors. As signüll said:
Storytelling is the only way to impose meaning on abundance, coherence on noise, & legitimacy on power.
We’re at a point in time where narrative capital converts into every other kind of capital.
Why storytelling ≠ PR and Marketing
A question that invariably crops up when talking about the storytelling function is “isn’t that just Marketing/ Comms/ PR rebranded?”
I have to agree that at many companies, it will inevitably be just a rebranding of traditional marketing, comms and brand roles to cater to newer expectations. The title of Storyteller/ Narrative Head has definitely permeated faster than the function itself. Does anybody concretely know what it means to be the Head of Storytelling? I’m not sure, and given we’re in the nascent stages of this function, we’ll probably see different variations of job descriptions for a while until the dust settles. But I do still think the timing isn’t accidental, and there’s real merit to understanding how different a Storytelling function can potentially be.
The cleanest test, in my opinion, is whether the narrative-building work changes what the company actually does, or only what people think about it.
I think the first differentiator is that real narrative-building starts at the top and determines what gets built, who gets hired, what gets declined. Traditional marketing, comms, and PR roles have not had that authority. In my experience, especially in tech, they come in after something has been built or decided, in an effort to package it the right way.
A narrative’s output, on the other hand, is coherence. It’s less about the sleek one-pager that you might get to after a marathon narrative-building exercise, and more about how much it influences everything that comes after, and how everything can be traced back to it. Marketing may not necessarily be concerned whether the billboards and the investor decks are saying the same thing. A storyteller should be.
There’s also a change in cadence. In terms of production, i.e. as a performance, Narrative needs to be produced daily, across every touchpoint. It’s not at all enough to have it come through in a PR-mandated cycle once every few months and around specific launch dates. Every element of the brand, from the product to the people and their ways of working, must live and breathe that narrative. So while these functions have been around, it’s the first time we’re seeing a push for this sort of cohesion.
The third factor I could identify is a change in disposition, specifically generative vs defensive. PR is almost restrictive by design because its intention is towards message discipline and crisis avoidance or management. Marketing, while a lot more open to creative ideas in the best companies, is also focused on finding the most optimal convergence, often sidelining multiple ideas in favour of the one that meets a specific goal i.e. conversion.
I think storytelling functions will claim the generative, expansive disposition. The way I see it, storytelling’s job is to open surface area, and multiply the ways in which and through which a company can be understood. As long as the underlying worldview is strong, the expression can vary in surprising and ideally gratifying ways.
Early shifts in the industry
So far the introduction of Storytelling and Narrative roles has been happening in two ways.
Notion is an example of one method: they collapsed brand, comms and content into one super-function reporting directly to the founder, called Storytelling. That signals a shift of those functions from downstream of strategy right to the source of it. As an org chart change, it sends a pretty clear message that the narrative becomes an artefact that everything else derives from.
The second method, of course, is introducing a standalone function. In the early days, this will continue to emerge out of high-agency people doing a bunch of creative narrative work and seeking to organise it under one function (like Mishti Sharma of Clay). In a year or two from now, we’ll begin to see similar roles mushroom across other companies—such is memesis—and we’ll see it in standalone storytelling functions of their own.
Lowkey permission-giving
The introduction of a Storytelling and Narrative function can, in a way, be permission-giving. I think it frees people to break away from the moulds that traditionally define creative projects in corporate tech worlds. My inkling is that a “Head of Storytelling” would be far more likely to take more creative decisions and risks than they would’ve as a PR Manager, not least because there are no hard-and-fast boundaries yet. We might start to see more and more people championing narrative-driven projects (for example, commissioning a mini-series like Bilt did).
This permission is a start, but companies where this function will compound are the ones where a causal story already exists, either in the founder’s head or already running through the business. A storyteller’s job becomes much more impactful when there’s already a strong sense, however unarticulate, of how the world works and why this company’s bet follows from it.