How to transform your vision into your team’s collective story

By Abby Kearns | CTO at Puppet

There’s a power in story I didn’t grasp when I was younger — a power and a privilege. Growing up in the rural south, story implied grandeur, vision, an arc that leapt gracefully from one place to the next. Story was a pattern, a bridge, a map to the future. Story felt bigger than me and full of the unknown, like a jet plane I didn’t know how to fly — not because I didn’t want to learn, but because I had no idea who to ask for lessons.

I didn’t have mentors. I didn’t know a position like CTO could even exist. What I knew was I wanted a different life from the one I had, but envisioning that life was like trying to write a sentence in a language I don’t speak. There were no visible stories about people like me to which I could aspire. I was building towards something without an outline.

It’s only now, looking back, that I see what a steady hand I had in writing my own story. It’s true that I lacked the vision to outline a specific narrative for myself, but only because I couldn’t envision a technology industry like what exists today, or living in a culturally diverse city, or spending my days talking about products that didn’t exist, or becoming a female executive in an industry dominated by men. But what I lacked in concrete vision, I made up for in imagination; I told myself the story of “something different” even if I couldn’t describe what I imagined yet.

Eventually, I took charge of my own story. As the future came into focus, I began to understand that storytelling gives purpose. This is a revelation that has massively impacted my growth as a leader. It’s one thing to talk about a product or a business initiative in a vacuum; it’s another thing entirely to tell the story of why a technology was created, what problems it solves, and how it makes an impact on human stories.

Abby Kearns

In my years as a technology leader, I’ve come to understand that storytelling is crucial to gain support for a vision. How else can you get people excited? Storytelling is the human element that enables a shared understanding and, ultimately, leads to innovation. People want to know what their place is in the story to understand their motivation. It’s what rouses people out of bed in the morning. What happens next? Am I a pivotal character? Who wins in the end?

Innovation is what happens when people are given the freedom to work outside the box. My job as a leader is to stretch my team’s current view of the world. I build the foundation and connect the dots on how products and solutions change customers’ lives — and then I hand that story to my team to make it their own. I empower my team to write the rest of the story, to understand the power this story can have on hundreds of other stories. 

“Eventually, I took charge of my own story. As the future came into focus, I began to understand that storytelling gives purpose. This is a revelation that has massively impacted my growth as a leader.”

Story exists in all things. Technology isn’t created in a void — it’s literally the stuff dreams are made of. Someone faced a challenge then dreamt up a story to solve it. They innovated and iterated and wrote their own story in order to positively impact other people’s stories, and the cycle continues.

I didn’t always own my own story. Even after I allowed myself to envision the future and began writing my story, I looked to the other stories around me to inform my own. For the first fifteen years of my career, I just wanted to fit into a male-dominated industry. I was undercover in my own story. My public story was very different from the one I had in my head; I felt pressured to create a narrative for myself that mirrored the stories of the successful men in my industry. Being vulnerable about my true story didn’t feel possible for many years, and so I wrote a fiction to eliminate any experiences that didn’t fit the mold. 

It wasn’t until the last five or ten years that I’ve been able to start sharing my story. As I look around and see so much more diversity in the tech industry, I am continuously humbled and inspired by the stories of gender minorities, people of color, and other underrepresented individuals in technology. Hearing their stories has given me the strength to be more open about my own. I am grateful to have found my voice in the decades-long story of my life, and to use that newfound power and privilege to begin sharing my story in the hope that it paves the path for stories yet to be written.