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:

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.