Stakeholder Management Tips for Product People
As product people, we rely on the stakeholders to successfully progress our product. But effective stakeholder management can be challenging. It can feel like herding cats with every stakeholder going off in a different direction pursuing her or his individual goal. This article offers practical tips to help you succeed in aligning the stakeholders, involving them in the right way, and securing their support for important product decisions.
You can listen to the audio version of this article here: https://www.romanpichler.com/romans-podcasts/stakeholder-management-tips-for-product-people/
Lead the Stakeholders — Don’t Please, Don’t Dictate
As the person in charge of the product, your aspiration should be to lead the stakeholders in order to create value together and achieve product success. In reality, however, some product people either aim to please the stakeholders by saying yes to their requests or by brokering compromises. Others do everything they can to make the stakeholders agree to their ideas and plans. But neither of these two approaches is desirable.
The first one carries the risk of being a feature broker and offering a product that has a weak value proposition, gives rise to a poor user experience, and consists of a loose collection of features. The second approach fails to leverage the knowledge and expertise of the stakeholders. What’s more, it makes it unlikely that the stakeholders will fully support the product decisions and that they will follow them through.
Effective stakeholder management starts by embracing the right attitude: See the stakeholders as equal partners; take an interest in their perspective, ideas, concerns, and underlying needs; build trustful connections with the individuals; and encourage the stakeholders to work together. But do not accept inappropriate behaviour and do not allow people to treat you like a project manager, team lead, or personal assistant. The following tips will help you with this.
Focus on the Right Individuals
A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in your product, who is affected by it, or who shows an interest in the offering. While this definition includes users and customers, I use the term in this article to refer to the internal business stakeholders. For example, these stakeholders are likely to include representatives from marketing, sales, support, and finance for a commercial product.
To focus your stakeholder management effort, identify your key stakeholders — those individuals with whom you want to establish a trustful connection and collaborate on a regular basis. This is particularly helpful when you are faced with a large group of stakeholders, which is not uncommon in bigger companies. A handy stakeholder analysis tool is the power-interest grid developed by Ackermann and Eden.
As its name suggests, the grid analyses the stakeholders by taking into account their power and interest; it assumes 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, and crowd, as the picture below shows
The players are your key stakeholders: These are the individuals whose trust you should earn, who you should closely collaborate with, who you should involve in important product decisions. This avoids the risk that the stakeholder management work becomes overwhelming and consumes too much of your time. For guidance on how to interact with the other stakeholder groups, please see my article “Getting Stakeholder Engagement Right”.
Build Trust
As the person in charge of the product, you lack transactional power: You cannot tell the stakeholders what to do, you cannot assign tasks to the individuals, and you are typically not in a position to offer a bonus, pay raise, or other incentives. At the same time, you rely on their work and support to progress the product, for instance, to market and sell it. How can you then guide the individuals and ensure that everyone moves together in the same direction?
The answer is by building trust. Here is why: As you lack transactional power, you must influence the stakeholders and encourage them to follow your lead. To do so, you have to earn the individuals’ trust. To put it differently, if the stakeholders don’t trust you, they won’t follow you and they won’t support your ideas and suggestions.
The following techniques will help you with earning the stakeholders’ trust:
- Empathise: Take a warm-hearted interest in the stakeholders and try to understand their perspectives, ideas, concerns, interests, and needs — no matter how likeable and agreeable you find the individuals and their views.
- Practice active listening: Make an effort to attentively listen to the stakeholders and cultivate an open mind.
- Speak and act with integrity: Say what you believe is true, be willing to admit mistakes, and walk your own talk.
- Get to know people and, for example, have lunch or coffee together, be it in the same room or online.
- Involve people in product decisions but don’t make the mistake of trying to please them.
- Increase your product management expertise.
Form a Stakeholder Community
Building trust with the stakeholders and effectively collaborating with the individuals is hard when the stakeholder group is changeable, when people come and go, for instance, when a new sales rep is assigned to your product every few months. I therefore recommend that you form a stable group of stakeholders and develop it into a stakeholder community where the individuals work together on a continued basis and learn to trust, respect, and support each other.
To build such a stakeholder community, try the following techniques, which I discuss in more detail in my book How to Lead in Product Management:
- Bring people together and have joint workshops instead of holding separate conversations with the individual stakeholders, see also the section below.
- Establish clear roles and responsibilities. If people aren’t clear on what is expected of them and who is doing what, confusion arises, and collaboration becomes more difficult.
- Collaboratively set goals, for example, user and business goals on the product strategy and product goals on the product roadmap.
- Improve the collaboration within the stakeholder group and address issues, for instance, by holding stakeholder retrospectives.
- Ask the Scrum Master to help you build a stakeholder community.
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/stakeholder-management-tips-for-product-people/
Learn More
You can learn more about leading the stakeholders by attending my Product Owner Masterclass and reading my book How to Lead in Product Management.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/stakeholder-management-tips-for-product-people/
