Why Storytelling Matters in Software Engineering
Somewhere along the way, we were told to keep our code clean, our docs concise, and our PRs objective.
And that’s fine - as far as syntax and semantics go. But when it comes to the why behind our work,
the stuff that helps teams thrive, learn, and avoid repeating painful mistakes?
That’s where storytelling comes in.
Yes, storytelling. In software engineering.
And no, I’m not talking about fairy tales or writing fanfic about your microservices. I’m talking about
the kind of storytelling that makes teams smarter, culture stronger, and technical decisions more
resilient over time.
Let’s unpack that.
1. Storytelling preserves context
Code explains what the system does. A good commit message might hint at how. But storytelling?
Storytelling tells us why.
And the why matters - especially when you're onboarding a new team member, revisiting a legacy decision,
or debugging something that’s suddenly on fire.
"We switched to Redis because the old system fell over during our biggest sales day. The DB couldn’t
keep up, and we had to make the call under pressure. Redis bought us breathing room, but we knew it
was a temporary fix."
That’s a story. It’s short, real, and powerful. It helps a future engineer understand trade-offs and
constraints that aren’t obvious in code.
2. Storytelling makes knowledge memorable
Ever been in a retro where someone says, “We should add that to the wiki,” and then... no one reads
the wiki?
Stories fix that. People remember stories. They tell each other stories. And that’s how knowledge
spreads in real teams.
A cautionary tale about a bug that took down prod because of a timezone issue? That’ll travel further
than a checklist ever will. Trust me.
3. Storytelling builds empathy
Engineering is full of tough calls - between shipping fast and building right, between tech debt and
user needs, between “just works” and “works forever.”
When you frame a feature in terms of the people it impacts - customers, support staff, engineers
themselves - it changes how people think.
"This isn’t just a backend job queue. It’s what lets the support team refund customers in seconds
instead of waiting for someone to run a script."
That’s empathy. That’s human. That’s motivation.
4. Storytelling shapes engineering culture
Ask any experienced engineer what they remember from their past projects, and odds are it won’t be the
database schema. It’ll be the time the team stayed up all night to fix something. The launch that
broke. The thing that almost shipped until they found a security bug at the eleventh hour.
Those stories are your culture. They encode values, cautionary lessons, and victories. They’re how
engineering orgs grow up.
5. Storytelling helps leadership land
If you want to lead effectively - whether that’s mentoring a junior dev, guiding a team through change,
or pitching an idea to stakeholders - you need more than a diagram. You need a narrative.
"Last year, we hit a wall trying to scale our monolith. It wasn’t the tech - it was how fast onboarding
broke down. That’s why we’re carving out this new boundary. Not because it’s trendy, but because it
solves a real pain.”
That’s a leader’s voice. That’s how you build trust and bring people with you.
So how do you tell better stories?
It’s not complicated. You just need:
- What happened
- Who did it affect
- What did we learn
- Why does it matter now
Bonus points if you leave in the failures. Vulnerability makes stories credible. You’re not writing a hero’s
journey. You’re writing a real one.
Final thought
Software engineers are not just architects of code - they're narrators of change. Every system we touch, every
decision we make, leaves a legacy. Storytelling is how we make that legacy understandable, shareable, and
useful to the people who come after us.
We already tell stories in Slack threads, retros, and pull request comments. Let’s just get better at doing
it intentionally.
Because in the end, it’s not just the code that matters.
It’s the story we tell about how we got here.