Telling Ideas That Stick: A Dev Leader’s Guide to Made to Stick
If you’ve ever watched a brilliant idea fall flat in a roadmap meeting—or sat through a sprint review where the real takeaway never landed—you already know what Made to Stick is about.
This book isn’t a surface-level read about being persuasive. It’s a deep dive into how we make ideas understandable, memorable, and actionable—especially in noisy, fast-paced environments like game and software development.
Chip and Dan Heath identify six principles that make ideas stick. They call it the SUCCES framework:
Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories.
Each is a force multiplier. Together, they’re a playbook for any leader trying to create clarity across complexity.
Let’s break each one down—with a focus on how you, as a dev leader, can apply it to make your updates, insights, and decisions land with more power and more staying power.
Simple: Strip It to the Core Message
Let’s start with the hardest thing to do in software: simplify.
Made to Stick opens with this brutal truth—if your idea can’t be explained in a single sentence, it probably won’t stick. Complexity isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a barrier to understanding.
This hits home in dev environments, where we deal with layered systems, cascading priorities, and a backlog that never quite empties. But here's the rub: your team doesn’t need everything. They need the core—the one idea they should remember when the meeting ends or the Slack thread scrolls out of sight.
Try this:
- When presenting roadmap tradeoffs, lead with: “This decision gets us to stable launch with two weeks to spare.”
- When discussing a dip in DAU, say: “This drop is caused by mobile players struggling with a bug in the onboarding flow.”
That’s clarity. And clarity scales.
Unexpected: Break the Pattern to Earn Attention
People stop listening when they feel they’ve heard it all before. So if you’re sharing metrics that matter—or asking for alignment on a difficult decision—you have to disrupt the pattern.
Unexpected doesn’t mean shocking or theatrical. It means surfacing the tension that makes people want to know more.
Example from a dev context:
“Bug counts are up, but P1s are down. Why? We’ve added better triage—but also missed three regressions in edge-case testing.”
You’re pulling people in by defying their assumptions. And once you’ve got their attention, you deliver meaning.
Build the habit: Start your updates by asking, “What’s surprising about this? What might challenge the room’s assumptions?”
Concrete: Say What You Mean, Not What Sounds Smart
Game and software teams are allergic to vagueness. And yet, we often fall into jargon: “velocity is volatile,” “sentiment is down,” “tech debt is mounting.”
Those phrases feel safe—but they don’t move people. What sticks is what’s tangible.
Let’s translate:
- “Sentiment is down” becomes: “Steam reviews dropped from 4.1 to 3.6 after we added monetization to the character creator.”
- “Velocity is down” becomes: “We completed 28 story points this sprint versus 41 last sprint—mostly due to rework from unclear UX flows.”
When you go concrete, you force clarity. You give your team something to grab onto—and something to respond to.
Want to go deeper? Add a screenshot, a quote, a before-and-after. Let people see the thing you’re talking about.
Credible: Build Believability into the Frame
Trust is the currency of leadership. And nothing kills trust faster than a fuzzy story that smells like spin.
Made to Stick reminds us that credibility isn’t about being an expert—it’s about grounding your message in details that feel real. In software and game development, you do this by showing your work.
Instead of saying, “Our player churn is under control,” say:
“We’re seeing a 12% churn rate post-Day 7—down from 18% last patch. The improvement tracks to the reduced onboarding steps and shorter tutorial session, which were flagged by 43% of churned players in exit surveys.”
No room for doubt. No sales pitch. Just evidence.
Pro tip: Don’t wait for someone to ask you “how you know.” Bake it in.
Emotional: Make the Data Matter to Humans
Developers, PMs, QA leads—we pride ourselves on logic. But decisions don’t live in spreadsheets. They live in priorities, anxieties, and aspirations. Made to Stick makes it clear: sticky ideas make people feel something.
In our world, this often means surfacing impact—on players, on the team, on outcomes people care about.
Example:
- “This isn’t just a 2-second load time regression. It’s 2 million players waiting through an extra loading screen every day—4 million lost seconds of play.”
Or:
- “By hitting 90% test automation, we’re buying back two full days of QA time every sprint—and reducing burnout risk in the process.”
The goal isn’t sentimentality. It’s relevance. Emotion makes your insight matter to someone.
Stories: Frame Insight Through Narrative
This is where it all comes together.
Stories are how humans process complexity. We don’t remember stats—we remember turning points, causes, consequences. We remember tension and resolution.
A story gives your insight a backbone. Instead of saying “support tickets went up,” tell this:
“Last Tuesday, a new player submitted a ticket about an unskippable cutscene causing soft-locks on console. By Friday, we had 146 similar reports. It turns out a minor physics fix had unintended side effects. That’s what caused the spike—and why we’re proposing a rollback before next week’s update.”
Short. Specific. Memorable. Actionable.
Want to improve your stories? Start with:
- What happened?
- Why did it happen?
- What did it lead to?
- What’s the next step?
Why This Matters More Than Ever
You lead in an environment of creative ambiguity and technical complexity. Teams are distributed. Attention is fractured. Priorities shift weekly. In that world, sticky communication isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s how you steer the ship.
Whether you’re presenting to execs, writing patch notes, or coaching your team on sprint planning—Made to Stick gives you the blueprint.
- Strip ideas to their core
- Lead with tension or surprise
- Use tangible language
- Back claims with credible signals
- Show why it matters to real people
- Wrap the message in a story
These are not cosmetic tools. They are strategic levers.
Use them, and you’ll do more than present good ideas. You’ll get buy-in. You’ll create alignment. You’ll shape direction.
And you’ll make your ideas stick.
