You're not trying to be the most impressive person in the room

People have been hyping each other up with hero stories for thousands of years. Every culture has them.

And yet every film or novel you've ever loved follows the same rough premise. The main character, the hero, faces a problem. As they’re struggling to solve the problem, they’re introduced to a guide who helps them through it, and our hero achieves success or avoids failure.

We're drawn to these stories because we instinctively place ourselves in the hero's position. We don't watch films hoping to be the guide. We want to be the one the story is about.

Think about Yoda and Luke Skywalker. Yoda is arguably the most capable character in Star Wars — ancient, wise, and powerful enough to deal with the Empire himself. But that's not his role. His role is to equip Luke, send him in, and trust him to defeat evil.

This is why it matters whose perspective your project story is told from.

The mistake most companies make

Most architects, designers, and developers tell their project stories from the wrong position.

Look what we designed. Look what we built. Look at the awards we won. It's understandable. You did the work. You solved the hard problems. You delivered a project you want to shout about.

But your clients aren't reading about your work to find out how talented you are. They're reading to find out whether you can help them. And when you position yourself as the hero of your own story, you put distance between you and the person you're trying to reach.

Clients want to be the hero of their own story

They have a problem they need solving, an outcome they're working towards, and a decision to make about who's best placed to help them get there. What they're looking for — consciously or not — is a guide. Someone who understands their situation, has navigated it before, and can help them through it.

When you make your client the hero, you create the space to understand their challenges, their constraints, and what success actually looks like for them. You stop talking about your firm and start talking about their future.

What this looks like in practice

Take two ways of opening the same project story.

The first:

"We were commissioned to design a new community library for a post-industrial town in the north of England. Working within a tight budget and a constrained site, we delivered a building that has since won three regional awards."

The second:

"The town hadn't had a library for eleven years. When the council finally secured funding, they needed a practice that could stretch a modest budget across a building for the whole community to use — and feel proud of."

Both are about the same project. But only one puts the client and their challenge at the centre.

Consider a workplace fit-out. You could write:

"We redesigned the office across three floors, incorporating flexible working zones and improved breakout space throughout."

Or you could write:

"The company had asked staff to come back to the office. Of course, nobody wanted to, so they needed a space worth the commute."

Same project. Completely different story. The second version describes a problem your reader might recognise from their own working life.

The guide isn't a lesser role

Reframing yourself as the guide doesn't mean underselling your expertise. It means deploying it differently. The guide is the experienced, trusted figure who knows the terrain — the one who has navigated this kind of problem before and knows the way through. That's a compelling position. It just requires you to lead with your client's story, not your own.

Yoda doesn't doubt his own abilities because Luke gets to fight Vader. His value is never in question, it’s expressed through preparation, knowledge, and trust in the person he's equipped. Effective project stories work the same way. Your expertise is present throughout — it’s just in service of someone else's outcome.

This means starting your project stories with the client's situation, not your appointment. Describing the challenge before you describe the solution. Measuring success by what changed for the people the project was for, not by the accolades it received afterwards.

A more useful question

Next time you sit down to write a project story, ask yourself: whose story is this, really?

If the answer is yours, start again. Find the client, find their problem, and build the story around them. You'll still be in it — you're the guide, after all. But the reader will feel the difference.