What happened
Vasu Kesiraju spent fourteen years at SAP, which he arrived at when it bought the hundred-person company where he was answering customer emails as a support engineer. In that time he built fan analytics for the 2015 Cricket World Cup, worked with several IPL teams, built SAP's Discovery Center from nothing, and then left for Rakuten to build an observability system. He opened by saying he was not going to teach anybody anything, because there is no recipe for this.
His frame was that a story has four parts and a product has the same four under different names. Characters are personas, conflict is the problem, resolution is the solution, and emotion is the passion you bring, which he was blunt about being the one you cannot fake. On characters he used Friends: he watched a random episode from the second season, decided it was rubbish, could not see why anyone found Joey funny, and only understood it later by starting from the first episode where the characters get introduced.
On conflict he said there is no story without one and reached for Baahubali, where the question of why Kattappa killed Baahubali is what sold the second film. He wanted the same discipline in a product demo, where the temptation runs the other way. Ninety per cent of the time on the problem, ten on the solution, on the grounds that climaxes are short: the white walkers in Game of Thrones were dealt with in about five minutes, and nobody watched eight seasons for that.
The part worth stealing was his map of who else in a company is telling a story about your product, and why none of them is telling yours. The CEO gives you a motion poster, which is vision with no specifics and never a conflict, because raising problems is not their job. Sales runs the trailer and sets expectations as high as they will go. Your manager is the background music, making everything feel fine, including the reason there is no raise this year. The engineers explain what is not possible and which part of the architecture would have to change first. The product manager is the only one who has to say what the superhero can actually do.
He wanted the same story told in different registers rather than different stories: the core stays, the delivery changes with the audience. That runs further down than people expect. Asking for two engineers and a designer is a story too, and asking flatly gets you an answer about budget. Say what happens if the hiring does not occur, then offer two or three routes to it, one of which is borrowing from another team. An early manager of his used to say a product should be explicable to your grandmother, which he took for a joke at the time.
He ended somewhere more uncomfortable, on speech, posture and dress. He looks younger than he is and had spent years being taken less seriously than his content deserved, until a mentor at SAP told him to put a blazer on. At a workshop in Mumbai shortly afterwards, somebody asked whether he was an IIM graduate and what he must be head of. He recommends the blazer, while being clear-eyed that he is describing how people judge rather than how they ought to.