How You Deal With the People Involved: Lessons in Stakeholder Management
How to collaborate with stakeholders to ensure everybody wins.
“Solving a situation depends on how you deal with the people involved.”
-unknown
The product which one manages is as good as the team that works on it. Any vision one might have for the product will never lift off the ground unless the entire team buys in and signs off on it.
Stakeholder management is the most important but often underrated skill. Without it, a product manager can not successfully do their job. In this article, here are three instances of stakeholder management experiences I have encountered over the years:
1. Use a whiteboard to get stakeholders aligned on priorities.
A common scenario I face is when I’m questioned about the product roadmap and prioritization. These questions are usually asked by senior management, engineering teams or sales/marketing teams — mostly internal stakeholders. Here’s an example of how I navigated a situation of this kind:
I was in charge of the project where as the product development had progressed, there was a need to move to react native from the ionic framework. The engineering team wanted to make this move at the earliest, but the MVP had proven to be successful, and there was a demand from the customers to build more features.
As a result, I scheduled conversations and that is when I brought forward the concerns from the engineering team to other stakeholders. At the same time, I explained with the help of the stakeholders that it is important to deliver the product so they can grow their user base to ensure subsequent funding. If we delay for the migration, and the user growth is not enough, there might not be a product to continue development on.
Once all perspectives were understood, everyone involved was able to come to an agreement — which included proceeding with the framework migration after acquiring a certain number of users.
Scenarios like this happen because stakeholders are understandably concerned about the features they want to implement, especially if they learn that some features are not achievable in a given timeframe. In this case, it’s important to realize that many stakeholders might not be aware of the larger context and why certain prioritization decisions are made.
To help these stakeholders understand the bigger picture, you must first, try to understand their perspective and where they are coming from. In conversations like this, I find that using whiteboards to illustrate certain concepts work best. During these whiteboard sessions I write down all the stakeholder points to make all the information visible to everyone, and we prioritize accordingly.
After the prioritization activity, we recap all the information discussed, then the decisions made, and we ensure we confirm agreements. The objective is to ensure a holistic discussion with all the relevant information, ensure that shared understandings are established, and decisions are made that are favorable to all stakeholders.
2. Adding more people to a project does not mean that the work will get done faster.
There are times when clients would request that I employ more people in order to complete certain tasks faster and earlier. In these scenarios, I usually explain to them that adding more resources and manpower will not guarantee an increase in speed, especially if there is already an optimum number of people working. Even if the client is willing to pay more for more resources and people, the speed of work cannot be increased.
This is largely because whenever you bring more people onto a project that is a work in progress, one has to make time to provide an onboarding and orientation in order to get the new people familiar with the project, its objectives and goals, dependencies, impediments, risks, and other relevant details. To do this takes time and it will slow down progress even more, so it’s critical that you sit down with stakeholders and help them to understand this reality.
3. Overcommunication always helps in events when you’re unable to meet a deadline.
This happens during release of the product, where we previously communicated to clients about a deadline, but in light of unanticipated events and impediments, we were unable to meet it. In these moments it’s best to just explain to the client about the challenges and apologize.
Communicate to the client in regard to the revised tentative deadline, and what you are doing to deliver within that deadline e.g., increasing the number of people working on the product, and/or explore options to descope certain features and schedule them to future release, if possible. Also, clearly communicate the impact on client to the product and development team and other stakeholders.
Working in an Agile Way Helps
Agile development has also helped a lot to deal with these situations, making clients part of sprint demo helps them clearly understand the development process and anticipate delays which makes them more understanding.
Stakeholder Empathy is Essential
Apart from this, the observation I have made over years is everyone wants to do their best. Engineers want to write code to the best of their abilities. Salespeople want to meet their targets and make clients happy. Clients want to make their own customers happy.
With all the before mentioned in mind, I find it’s always best to demonstrate empathy and compassion, and work to understand others, while explaining your position, and have a conversations accordingly. In time, many of the problems are can be solved and even better solutions are found by collaborating with stakeholders to ensure everybody wins.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
