The Product Gist #13: Stakeholder Management

Great stakeholder management, Great product success.

The soft skills series continues. In this series, I will be talking about the soft skills that you need to build up to become a better product manager. So far, I have talked about Curiosity and Time Management.

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Hi there,

Previously in this soft skills series, I talked about time management, its importance, and tips that you could use to manage your time effectively.

Next, I will be talking about Stakeholder Management.

In product management, anyone who has a direct or indirect stake in your product is a stakeholder. Identifying the key stakeholders in your product when you join a new company is crucial for success as a product manager & relying on them allows our product to progress quickly.

So who are your stakeholders?

Your users are key external stakeholders for obvious reasons being that you build the products for them. However, the true art of stakeholder management primarily refers to the internal stakeholders like sales, marketing, CEO, executives, customer success, product teams, etc. when you have identified your key stakeholders, the next step is to ensure their support, information, influence, and buy-in to progress with your product vision.

Prioritise Your Stakeholders

Starting as a product manager, I was naive to think everyone had an equal influence on my product. It took me a few months before I could identify and prioritise my key stakeholders. It became easier to note the level of influence each person had on the product and why. Just like you would prioritise items in your backlog, you need to prioritise the people who have a stake in your product after you have identified them. To do that, you can work with something called the power interest grid, a tool described by Ackermann and Eden (2011).

The grid analyses the stakeholders by taking into account their power and interest; it guesses that people take a low or high interest in your product and have low or high power. This results in four stakeholder groups:

• Players

• Subjects

• Context setters

• Crowds.

Roman Pichler advises that you find out how much a stakeholder is likely to be interested in your product, and consider if and to which extent the person will be affected by it. Also, to understand how powerful a stakeholder is, ask yourself if you need the individual to develop or provide the product and if the individual can influence product decisions.

Let’s take a little dive into each stakeholder presented on the grid.

Stakeholders with high interest and high power are called players. These people are important associates for you. Hence, you should create a trustful relationship with them, and involve them in crucial product decisions.

Subjects are individuals with high interest but low power—for example, product people and development teams who work on related products. These individuals are affected by the product and may be keen to influence it, but they can’t veto or change decisions. They make great backers who can help you secure understanding and buy-in for your product across the business. A way to keep them involved is by aligning roadmaps, solving problems and inviting them to design reviews, product reviews or demo sessions.

People with low interest but high power are called context setters. They affect the product’s context but have little or no interest in the product itself. These people are often powerful senior and executive managers. Regularly consult them to build and maintain a healthy relationship, but don’t allow them to dictate decisions. Have the courage to say no (while saying no, back it with a reason so that you are just saying no for the fun of it) to their suggestions, especially if it does not bring value to the user and business and help you achieve product success.

Not everyone can be a part of the three mentioned above. Some would have to settle for being a part of the crowd. These individuals are not particularly interested in your product and don’t have the power to influence product decisions. A good way to influence them is by keeping them informed. Also, give them access to the product documents like PRDs, strategy documents, roadmaps, etc. Let the document be a living one and inform them when changes are made.

Not everyone placed in a specific quadrant might be the right one. Some might be in more than one quadrant on diverse occasions. The trick here is to engage these stakeholders at whatever point they are in the quadrant. For example, if you notice an executive who is a context setter starts becoming a subject or a player, you need to understand why that is transpiring and engage accordingly.

Do not have too many key stakeholders on the grid as too many cooks may spoil the broth.

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Managing Stakeholders Well

TL;DR

• Align early and often

• Understand your stakeholders

• Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!

• Community, not individuals

Align Early and Often

Stakeholders need to be involved in your product journey. You need to engage them in the lifecycle of your product and various touchpoints as early and as often as possible. Such touchpoints could include involving them in product research, product documentation, sprint demos, reviews, etc. There are scenarios where the customer success team have little information on what the product team is developing. When the feature is released, it might be difficult for the customer success team to manage customers due to a lack of knowledge.

Failure to achieve alignment early and often means there might be a risk of them not being on the same page with you and your team.

Understand your stakeholders.

As product managers, we often think that when a stakeholder is difficult, they do not want the product to move forward. More often than not, that is not the case. Instead of boxing the stakeholder as enemy number one, try to understand their thought process. When you take the time to understand their challenges and communicate in a way that will help them, you thwart misinterpretations, adjust mindsets and get buy-in.

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!

While it is great that you know the goals of your stakeholders & you are aligning them with them early, remember to communicate repeatedly and regularly along the way. Communicating with them provides visibility and allows you to incorporate trust and build a relationship. When a stakeholder gives feedback, don’t just throw it aside. Feedback drives product innovation. Ignoring the stakeholder when they give feedback will make them feel not heard. A stakeholder who does not feel heard might not be your ally in the long run.

Community, not Individuals

A single broomstick cannot clean as well as a broom would do. Likewise, make stakeholder management more of a collaboration than an individual conquest. Engaging stakeholders individually usually ends up with the product manager trying to satisfy the different needs of the stakeholders all at once, which is not optimal for product success.

Instead, collaborate with the stakeholders as a community and foster a sense of togetherness. Let them all be engaged accordingly with decisions made on the product instead of blindsiding them.

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Not everything will go your way.

There are always challenges with managing stakeholders (especially the difficult ones) mainly because they are human & which means they will always have different interests for the product that do not align with yours. The goal here is not to feel disheartened and overwhelmed. The goal is to secure the best decision or outcome for the product. That includes:

• You being part of a win-win type of situation

• Prioritising the stakeholder’s needs due to business importance

• Saying no to that stakeholder even though it is not what they want to hear

While trying to achieve your goal, you must know how to lead, not please or dictate to stakeholders.

In all of this, it is vital to recognise the place of empathy. Leading conversations with empathy helps build better relationships with your stakeholders.

With better relationships, you can build better products.

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Interesting Things I Have Found Lately…

• Your product backlog ages like milk, not wine

• Frame your questions better with Abstraction Laddering

• Influence senior stakeholders by bringing new information to the table

I hope your product journey is progressing well. Please, if you have any questions about product management, you can shoot me an email. I will respond as soon as I can.

Take care and good luck,

Fumnanya