I had a call last month with a technical founder.
Raised $5M. Inventing a new category. Solving a complex riddle.
He’d gone through four marketing agencies in eighteen months.
When I asked him why, he said: no one came back with language that sounded like us.
It was too generic.
What looked like perfectionism was craft. He was rejecting the drafts because none of them captured the essence of the complexity of what they’re up to. It had no narrative. Functional utility without a conceptual architecture to hold it together.
His integrity wouldn’t let him send the surface layer into the world before the load-bearing layer was built.
Anyone managing an exponential rate of change runs into this.
You can’t explain your own company the same way twice.
Or you’re operating alongside a CEO or founder who can’t.
That’s the moment we’re in.
Most companies have outgrown the language they have for it.
What’s happening
The company you started, or walked into, isn’t the company you’re inside of right now.
The team grew. The market shifted. The product expanded. The category is redefining itself in real time. Every six months it gets bigger, more complex, more multi-dimensional. The language you have for it starts feeling smaller than what’s true.
You take for granted what everyone else most wants and needs to know.
Part of this is the Curse of Knowledge. The 1990 Stanford finding that says once you know something, you can’t remember what it’s like to not know it. What’s obvious to you isn’t obvious to anyone else.
Truth is, nobody will ever connect the dots as well as you do.
And that’s a problem if you want the story to travel without you or the CEO in the room.
The work underneath
Sharper one-liners and better decks are the WHAT and the HOW. Surface layer.
Underneath is the narrative architecture.
The ownable words and phrases. The load-bearing concepts. The WHERE, the WHO, and the WHY of what you’re building.
Take Stripe. Surface: “payment APIs for online businesses.” Architecture: “increase the GDP of the internet.”
Patagonia is the same shape. Surface: “outdoor clothing.” Architecture: “in business to save our home planet.”
One layer is what they sell. The other is what every product, every hire, every partner conversation ladders to. The architecture is the frame that holds the whole company.
Narrative is the architecture. Stories are the furniture.
Without the architecture, every story sits in the room without a structure to belong to.
When a leader hasn’t yet built the architecture, the rest of the company feels it. Sales improvises a version that closes the quarter. Product improvises a version that defends the roadmap. Investors fill in their own thesis. Press writes whatever frame is easiest.
Each is a sentence without an architecture to belong to. None is yours.
What rendering looks like
Clarity, confidence, and conviction are contagious. So is the absence of them.
Once you have the architecture, you stop trying to say the same thing every time. The rooms get easier.
The investor is asking where this goes in ten years.
The enterprise buyer is asking what this does for me right now, because 98% of what’s coming at them is noise.
The team is asking how this fits my job today.
Each room is asking a different question. Your answer renders the same architecture from a different angle.
Same WHERE. Same WHO. Same WHY. Different facets.
One architecture, alive enough to keep its shape no matter what room it walks into.
Three questions to find it
Your work is helping your people make sense of a moment turned upside down.
Three questions get you there. They’re the guideposts for finding the bigger narrative.
Name the Change. What’s shifting? And what does that shift make possible? What can we do now that we couldn’t before? The clearer you name the change, the more legible the moment becomes for everyone else.
Show Empathy. Demonstrate an intimate understanding of your market, your customers, your users, your employees. You win the right to lead the transformation by describing their desires and dilemmas better than even they can.
Provide Continuity. Give people reasons to believe amidst the unknowns and uncertainties. What do you source your conviction from? What do we source ours from?
Answer these three, and the architecture starts to build itself.
Where you are
Your job is shifting. From explaining the company to building the narrative that explains it for you.
You’re at the place where the company has outgrown the early language for it. That’s a marker of what you’ve built.
The architecture is in front of you. Building it is the work.
Michael
Great piece. You just described my job to a T, working with founders and tech leaders.
I love the way you explain the process. Similar, to how I bring founders along in building an architecture before other assets. But a style that’s uniquely yours.
Like you, I often take on clients that have been through two or more branding or PR firms before they find me. But it’s the best part of the job to see the light bulb go once they see themselves in framework we build together.