5 Stakeholder Management Tips for Product Pros
Stakeholder management is a huge part of the product manager’s job. However, it’s also the most mysterious, fraught, imposter-syndrome-inducing part of the work. I’ve seen otherwise competent and confident product people reduced to tears and nervous twitches at the mere thought of a stakeholder meeting. This is only compounded when those stakeholders have fancy titles and reserved parking spots.
Why? These people put their pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else (unless your name is Bruce Dickenson — then, well, if you know you know.) Just like your customers, they have motivations, pain points and business needs that are your responsibility to understand and try to meet as a product person. The experience of getting to know them and their perspectives is going to give you the opportunity to broaden your influence, deepen your business acumen, and increase the impact and success of your product. What’s not to love?
Here are five tips for strengthening your stakeholder relationships:
#1 – Take the Time to Understand Their Personal AND Professional Motivations
Of course, you already know that the key to success is knowing what your stakeholders care about, right?
Let’s start with what they care about in their job. Do you know what part of the company strategy or annual goals they are responsible for? Start with what is obvious, based on org charts and reporting structures. Then dig deeper — the CFO or VP of Finance might appear to care about good margins (increased revenue and decreasing expense) but there may be certain areas of the balance sheet that they are most focused on improving.
What you can glean from their title alone isn’t enough. Ask more questions. What’s the report or dashboard that they open up first thing in the morning? What is their boss asking of them? What do they see as the most important impact/outcome of your product? What is keeping them up at night?
As you’re getting to know what they care about at work, be sure to take note of their personal motivators too. Is this the kind of person who loves to be in the weeds? Are they a blue-sky thinker? Do they like being seen as knowledgeable or as an influencer? Do they lead with heart, looking for compassionate and collaborative solutions? Have they been successful in navigating thorny political situations, or are they the one creating them?
Understanding personal and professional motivations will help you navigate how you want to engage them moving forward.
#2 – Map Your Stakeholders
Creating an actual document that acknowledges your stakeholders and their needs feels a bit elementary. Do it anyway — it will keep you on track when you are running a million miles an hour, trying to keep ahead of the curve.
Start by naming the stakeholders, by area of work and name. Make note of both their influence in the organization and their interest in the product. Lucid’s Stakeholder Power Interest Grid can help you do a quick analysis. Download our version of this here.
Let’s get real for a second — there are just some people that you need to be really connected to and communicate well with in order for you all to find success. It might be because they hold the purse strings, or maybe they are just super-passionate about this area of work. It also might be that they have a reputation for “swoop and poop” — coming in at the last minute to kill a project or release. Keeping these folks engaged throughout the cycle will save you so much energy.
Once you have this simple, but critical task done, work through each quadrant and put your communication and engagement plan into action according to their needs.
#3 – Always Be Clear in What You’re Asking For
I’m a big fan of a discuss/decide/deliver framework. Knowing which mode you’re in can help individuals and teams understand how to engage on a topic or in a meeting. A similar framework can easily be implemented with stakeholders, to make clear what you are asking them to do with the information.
Are you informing them about something? Is it new information, or a change to a status update or previous communication? Then say so! Consider a short, pithy emails like:
Hey Steve - I have a quick update on the timing for the new authentication interface. As we talked about last week, we’ve hit some snags in user testing, and the team has had a chance to refactor and plan for that work. It looks like we’re going to have that ready for production in early September, targeting the 9/10/21 release, but that’s not firm yet, so let’s keep that an internal target until we know more.
No action needed on your part. If you want to see the wireframes for the refactored UI, it's <here>. Otherwise, please let me know if you have any questions.
See what I did there? It’s short, it’s clearly an informational email, and I call out that there is no action necessary — but an openness if they need more information.
What about when you need a decision? Well, you make that clear too.
Hi Steve - I’m looking for input from you on the issue below, no later than end of day Monday. Thanks for your help keeping our release plan on schedule.
As we talked about last week, we’ve hit some snags on user testing for the new authentication interface, and we’ve completed the refactoring. Development is already underway, but we need you to sign off on the new privacy disclosure feature before the end of the day on Monday. Note that Sue, Jane and Bill all signed off on it today, and they’ll be a part of the final testing before we push it to production on 9/10.
You can review it <here>. Please do so by the end of the day on Monday, and if you have any problems or concerns, you can reach me at 555-123-4567.
Again, it is clear from the jump what I am asking for, and I summarize the info, give simple instructions on what I need and when I need it, and then it’s done.
You know what’s not in either of these messages? Open-ended questions. Long explanations. Asking, “Steve, what do you want to do about that user testing problem?” That’s not his job, it’s yours — you’re showing up having done the work, you’re informing or asking for action, and you’re letting him get on with his life, while you get on with yours.
There are of course times where you need to explore ideas or options with stakeholders, and that’s totally fine, as long as you do it in the right format. Schedule time and be clear about the agenda.
#4 – Skip the Surprise Party
When things go sideways, resist the urge to just do jazz hands and hope no one notices the mess that’s unfolding behind you. You can use the same inform/action model as above, to make sure your stakeholders know about what’s going on before they hear about it in the hallway, at the next exec meeting, or — worst of all — on Twitter or in the news.
Be upfront about what happened, what you know about the situation, and what is happening to address it. Let them know when/how often you’ll be updating them on the resolution. Ask for the help you need in getting what you need from them, their teams, or their influence to get things back on track.
Depending on the blast radius for the problem, there will be time for analyzing what happened, and they’ll want to be a part of that. But their mood will be vastly improved if they hear about it from you, rather than through the grapevine.
#5 – Respect the Security Blanket
This one is a special shout-out for those product people who are managing stakeholders through a product transformation. Your stakeholders are going to be all over the map (see #2 above) and many will resist change because they’ve built their reputations, habits and success on the old operating model. And they’re going to hold on to their old dashboards, reports and governance meetings like a toddler holds on to a security blanket on laundry day — with a white-knuckled death grip.
Pick your battles. Your operating model might freak them out, but see if you can’t wean them off of their time/budget reporting dashboards with updates that soothe their need to know whether or not work is on track and money is being spent thoughtfully. I know that the old stoplight reports and gantt charts feel like handcuffs, but perhaps pulling your product themes and epics into a dashboard, and reporting on health, is going to give them the transparency they need to know about what you’re working on. Maybe a team run rate with spending QTD and YTD will help them see the tie between outcomes and investments.
Want to see my template for presenting progress against outcomes in a format that will comfort change-resistant stakeholders? Download it here.
Try to meet them halfway, and try to train them into new habits and approaches. Don’t just sneak that security blanket into the trash, and hope they won’t notice. Because they will.
Good Stakeholder Management WILL Impact Your Team’s Ability to Succeed
You were hired to do a job, and most likely, “play well with others” is in the job description in one form or another. It’s an often-thankless part of your job — especially when others don’t live up to the standards you set — and it requires showing up with a commitment day in, day out, to making sure the people you work with are getting what they need to be successful.
It’s worth taking the time to do it right!