“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
Epictetus
Have you ever been an avid user of a product and then one day something is different? It could be that the interface design has changed, a function you used to rely on has moved or an entirely new section has been added. As a user, that can be a shocking experience. If it affected you interaction with the product enough, you probably wished you knew it was coming sooner.
Now imagine working for a company that changed their product without informing you. You might feel surprised, upset or frustrated. In product management, we call that stakeholder mismanagement.
The product manager determines what gets built by the team and delivered to customers, but doing that in a vacuum is a recipe for disaster. It’s of critical importance that the PM and stakeholders are aligned and in close communication.
I’ve seen product teams deliver highly valuable features to users, but they neglected to communicate the timing of those features to people outside the product team. The result was a loss of trust.
Sales needs to know what to sell, marketing needs to know what to market, customer success needs to know how to handle customer requests, etc.
Stakeholder mismanagement happens for a wide variety of reasons, but I’ll get into that later.
First, let’s define who stakeholders are and why they’re important.
What are stakeholders?
Stakeholders are people who are able to influence product decisions and are impacted (directly or indirectly) by the product. There are two primary types — external and internal.
External stakeholders are usually people who either use the product (end users) or are involved in the adoption of the product (decision makers). These stakeholders fall under the blanket term “users” and are treated differently than internal stakeholders.
Since there’s a seemingly infinite supply of information on user behavior, I will speak only to internal stakeholders in this post.
At startups and small companies, this is usually a short list of key members on the team. At large companies, this is a much bigger list of people from cross-collaborative teams.
What stakeholders are not?
Owners of product decisions.
Too often I’ve seen passionate stakeholders dictate whether a feature ships or what should be worked on next. Oftentimes that happens because stakeholders have more seniority than the product manager.
At good product companies, this is nipped in the bud or prevented altogether. But it can happen at many companies that haven’t yet empowered their product teams, which indicates a much deeper problem that won’t get into here.
Why are they important?
Stakeholders are important to the success of a product (and company) because they provide a unique lens into their area of expertise and can notify product managers about constraints, dependencies and other important pieces of information that will help the product manager decide what to build.
This can include:
- Leadership / Executives
- Business partners (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Onboarding)
- Legal
- Finance
- Business Development
- Other product managers
What makes managing stakeholders difficult?
It takes time, a relatively high EQ, good communication and listening skills. As with anyone, stakeholders have or their own agenda and goals that could possibly conflict with the product direction.
It’s not measurable — product managers typically like doing things that can be measured and can positively impact their OKRs and product strategy. There isn’t always an obvious correlation between communicating with stakeholders and improving metrics.
It’s easy to forget about — when the team is in the weeds, it can be difficult to take a step back, see the bigger picture and how stakeholders could be affected by changes being made.
It’s hard at scale — as a company grows, so do stakeholders. An approach that might have worked for a company of 30 will likely fail for a company of 130.
What’s a product manager to do?
Luckily there are some best practices product managers can use to make relationships with stakeholders fruitful. I’ll break this into two buckets — determine who they are and how to successfully communicate with them.
Determining who your stakeholders are
I like dividing stakeholders into two groups — actives and passives.
Active stakeholders are members of teams that are directly impacted by your product. Think of teams like Customer Success or Marketing. Customer Success will be fielding questions directly from your users. Marketing will be responsible for communicating your product’s value and benefits.
Passive stakeholders are less involved, but still need to understand what’s happening at a high level. Think most of the C-Suite (unless you’re filing an IPO or involved in an acquisition) and other product teams (as long as your product doesn’t interact too closely with theirs).
Now before you create a laundry list of every member on each team you think needs to be actively or passively involved, lets zoom out.
It’s likely that other product teams will have a similar list to yours. If every member of every team is involved, no one would spend a minute outside meetings. That is why you should designate one “ambassador” for each team that will be added to your active stakeholder list. This person is commonly the team lead (but doesn’t have to be) and will be partly responsible for updating their team on key takeaways from conversations with the product team.
This is what a stakeholder list could like for a product team.
Active Stakeholders
- Sales – John C
- Marketing – Ashley M
- Customer Success – Peter A
- Legal – Marisa Z
- Onboarding – Wendy H
Passive Stakeholders
- Leadership/Executive team
- Sales team
- Marketing team
- Customer Success team
- Legal team
- Onboarding team
- Finance team
- Other Product teams
- Solutions Engineering team
Managing and communicating with stakeholders
Once you understand who your stakeholders are, the next and most critical step is relationship building. As with any other relationship, it’s about trust. The product manager should trust stakeholders to provide key information about their part of the business. Stakeholders should trust the product manager to have a deep comprehension of the users, business and technology.
To start, schedule one on ones with your active stakeholders. Ask questions, listen and set expectations on how they will be involved. Just like you would with user interviews, try to learn as much as possible about your stakeholders goals and motivations. Begin to gain alignment on how the product can help them achieve their goals..
A few great ways to keep stakeholders engaged is to ask for their feedback on early prototypes, schedule brainstorming sessions about real user problems or share results of recently run A/B tests.
Stakeholder process
There are some people out there who are naturally great at regular communication. They instinctively know what messages to convey to whom at the perfect time. Unfortunately, and this is an understatement, those people are incredibly rare.
For the rest of us, a communication process is necessary to ensure everyone is aligned and no balls are dropped. Here’s the breakdown of my communication process. Feel free to steal all or pieces of it.
Conclusion
Love it or hate it, but stakeholder management is an absolutely essential part of a product manager’s role. Mismanaging stakeholders can be detrimental to the team, the business and the success of the product manager.
At first it might seem like a lot of work, but once trust is built and a process is put in place, communicating with stakeholders will become second nature.
Take the time to get this part right and there will be much more time to devote to the team and users.