Creating narratives that scale

Creating narratives that scale

One of the curious things about growing organisations is how they develop their narrative muscles. Early on, storytelling is organic and personal: founders pitch to investors, early employees share their vision, everyone knows why they're building what they're building. But scale changes this dynamic in interesting ways.

At around 100 people—a little short of the Dunbar number—organisations hit their first narrative complexity cliff. The CEO can no longer personally tell the company story to every new hire. Product managers can't individually explain the roadmap to every team member. The informal systems that worked for knowledge sharing start breaking down. This is when organisations typically start trying to systematise their storytelling.

But I’ve noticed that here’s where most people get it wrong. They treat this as a documentation problem rather than a systems problem. They build repositories instead of narratives. Having worked with both agencies (Obvious) and large product companies (Slice and PhonePe), I've seen this pattern play out repeatedly. Knowledge bases become graveyards of outdated information. Onboarding documents turn into checklist exercises rather than compelling narratives about why the work matters.

The interesting shift happens when organisations start thinking about storytelling as infrastructure. Take sales narratives: at Obvious, closing 1cr+ deals wasn't about creating better pitch decks: it was about building systems that helped us consistently tell compelling stories about value. The same deck structure that worked for one client started working for others, not because we were templating success, but because we had found patterns in how value propositions scale.

This pattern repeats across contexts. Internal communications, product marketing, even technical documentation: they're all essentially exercises in scalable storytelling. When PhonePe needed to launch multiple products across different markets, my challenge wasn't just to craft individual narratives. It was to building systems that could generate consistent and adaptive stories across different contexts.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how narrative systems evolve with organisations. What works for a 50-person agency doesn't work for a 500-person product company. The tools change (from simple docs to complex LMSs), the channels multiply (from all-hands meetings to multi-tiered communication systems), but the core challenge remains: how do you maintain narrative coherence at scale?

The organisations that do this well understand that they're not just building communication channels, they're building narrative infrastructure. They create systems that help teams tell better stories, frameworks that maintain consistency while allowing for adaptation, and tools that turn institutional knowledge into living narratives.

Voice & identity systems: PhonePe, Indus Appstore, Pincode, Share.Market and Obvious

Coming soon

Playbooks and cultural knowledge architecture: Obvious and PhonePe

Help centre design: Pause

Mixternal communications: Obvious and PhonePe

Voice & identity systems: PhonePe, Indus Appstore, Pincode, Share.Market and Obvious

Coming soon

Playbooks and cultural knowledge architecture: Obvious and PhonePe

Help centre design: Pause

Mixternal communications: Obvious and PhonePe

Voice & identity systems: PhonePe, Indus Appstore, Pincode, Share.Market and Obvious

Coming soon

Playbooks and cultural knowledge architecture: Obvious and PhonePe

Help centre design: Pause

Mixternal communications: Obvious and PhonePe

Notes from the field

Shaping a brand voice for Pause

Aug 2022

Narratives are engines of change

Feb 2025