CASE-STUDY STORYTELLING
The research was already strong.
The reader had to work too hard to understand it.
The challenge was deciding what the reader needed to understand, then making every slide serve that story.
Amandeep shared a substantial mixed-methods study about eBay’s Search Results Page. It already contained business context, stakeholder complexity, 4,141 survey responses, 20 interviews, recommendations, product outcomes, and thoughtful limitations.
My work was not to invent a better project. It was to make the strongest story easier to see.
ORIGINAL → REWRITE: 37 slides → 24 slides
Shorter was the result of clearer hierarchy, not the goal.
Strong research. A story that still felt like a research report.
The original case study was thorough because the work was thorough. But a portfolio reader does not have the context of the team—or much time to reconstruct it.
Amandeep described the problem plainly: “It definitely felt a bit more like a report.” Condensing the work was difficult, and so was knowing what deserved attention: “I didn’t know what were the parts to highlight.”
The harder issue was continuity. He knew the material, but not always which section should come first or what someone without insider knowledge needed before moving forward. He later said this was something he could not self-diagnose.
The case study did not need stronger research. It needed clearer hierarchy, sequencing, and purpose.
The stakeholder section contained a stronger story than it was telling.
The stakeholder goals were creating a product decision: How much information could the page carry before useful context became clutter?
Before, the portfolio documented different stakeholder goals. After, it made the decision created by those goals immediately understandable: Protect scanability vs. Build buyer confidence.
Nothing about the disagreement was invented or dramatized. The facts were already there. The rewrite changed what the reader was asked to notice.
I framed the decisions research needed to support.
“We” became clearer without overstating “I.”
A hiring manager should not have to guess which work belonged to Amandeep and which belonged to the wider team. But clearer ownership does not mean claiming team accomplishments as individual work.
The rewrite separated three things:
- Amandeep’s evidence: what he shared.
- Collaborative work: what he did with cross-functional partners.
- Product-team ownership: the prioritization and delivery owned by product teams.
Amandeep said he sometimes defaulted to “we did this as a team.” Seeing the work framed more precisely made him think differently about the leadership he demonstrated as an individual contributor.
“It was empowering to realize the work you do, and that you can describe it in understandable terms.”
I did not give Amandeep leadership he did not have. I made his existing contribution easier to recognize.
Every slide needed one clear job.
Amandeep’s immediate reaction was simplicity. The rewrite felt more streamlined, easier to skim, and easier to understand without reading every detail. He noticed less competing information and “one message kind of per slide.” The titles told the reader what mattered before they read deeper.
The original already described Phase 1 as the “What” and Phase 2 as the “Why.” I did not invent that logic.
4,141 people told us what mattered. 20 interviews helped explain why.
The research methods stayed. Their relationship became the slide’s message.
Making the impact clearer did not mean taking more credit.
Both versions contain the same evidence: a 1.8% increase in click-through rate, more than 250,000 Electronics listings using granular condition labels, and a 0.7% increase in add-to-cart actions.
The original says the decisions were “driven by research.” The rewrite uses more careful language: related product changes showed measurable gains, and research was one contributing input.
I did not make Amandeep look stronger by making a larger causal claim. I made the evidence easier to see while keeping the ownership credible.
Strong positioning isn’t claiming more. It’s making the strongest defensible story easier to understand.
What Amandeep noticed
“You didn’t really change what I was presenting. You changed how it was presented.”
He also described the rewrite as “simple, more streamlined,” adding that he could skim it much quicker and still understand it. In his first written reaction, he said: “The narrative flows very well now and I can see how a non researcher can quickly understand the methodology, insights and recommendations.”
The lesson
The value wasn’t generating cleaner sentences. It was deciding what each slide needed to prove.
That meant deciding what deserved attention, what could be shorter, what belonged together, what Amandeep owned, what the team owned, where context became a decision, and which evidence strengthened—or competed with—the story.
A strong case study doesn’t show everything that happened. It makes the right things impossible to miss.
Explore another transformation
Quentin Gillon — A design-system story became an organizational-change story. →
Pets at Home — A screen-led process became a decision-led story. →
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