The Common Sense Series — Never Neglect Your Internal Stakeholders
4 ways to make sure people will follow you to the moon
Sounds really straightforward doesn’t it? And yet it seems like buy-in from internal stakeholders is very often taken for granted. I can hear you protesting from your remote office somewhere out there — that’s not me, I always talk to leadership about my plans and their buy-in is crucial to anything I do as a product manager. I believe you and they are not the internal stakeholders I mean.
Leadership are the ones who can make or break your initiatives internally, they have power. And so we inform them, consult them, involve them. While you can probably get by for a while without doing so, it will end up being a blocker if you don’t. However, the internal stakeholders I’m talking about are your peers — think sales (engineers), account managers, customer success, product marketing. The ones who talk to customers for hours a day. The ones who sell the product over and over again, the ones who handle escalations or talk about the roadmap to the customers.
Let me illustrate by telling you a story about Joel. Joel is a great guy, he’s been a PM for the company for a couple of years, has tackled very difficult topics and successfully delivered. He’s a role model for junior PMs within the team. He always tries to get everyone looking at the big picture and focus on the customer rather than on features. Joel recently got a promotion, he got more responsibility and will be managing people. When asking what people in the wider organisation thought about the promotion, the feedback was ‘I don’t really get why he got promoted, he’s never available for questions and he never replies to his slack messages or to comments in tickets.. I don’t really know what he does all day’. All of Joel’s achievements reduced to the fact that he was unresponsive on Slack!! You might wonder why Joel should care since he got the promotion despite his reputation outside of the product team.
As much as your customers, your peers need to know who you are and what your vision is. At the very least they need to understand where you’re (not) going and why. They are the first line of defence, the boots on the ground, they spend their days building trust with our customers. Yes, you talked to their managers and yes, their managers probably trickled down the information to them. It unfortunately doesn’t take away from the fact that they need some loving to.
If your peers are behind what you are doing, they will be your greatest ambassadors. Their excitement will shine through in every meeting they have with customers and other team members. They will be proud to work on this product alongside you. If they don’t believe or understand the direction you’re taking… well I think you can imagine. They’ll brag a little less, let escalations through a little more. They’ll be less enthusiastic and convinced in their roadmap talks.
Customers notice that and it slowly almost imperceptibly damages the relationship and their belief that they made the right choice in choosing your product.
So what can you do? Like it or not, it’s as much about selling your roadmap as selling yourself.
Over communicate.
I’ll start with the easiest bit of advice.
As I mentioned, make sure the wider organisation understands what you’re (not) working on, and why. Make sure that they can find the information easily and know where to go to ask questions or share concerns. This will make them feel confident about the material and will make sure they know how to position themselves in meetings with customers.
They now have the information but how can you make sure they get excited about the product direction and roadmap? Just like laughter and yawns, enthusiasm is very contagious. Seeing and hearing your enthusiasm and passion will go a long way to getting them excited too.
Be approachable.
If we were in an office right now, I would tell you to make smalltalk with anyone and everyone at the coffee machine. Unfortunately most of us are remote which poses a challenge. So how can you be approachable from the confines of your home?
- Present your initiatives during team meetings — this gives a chance to your peers to get a feel for you, ask questions and most importantly it’s the best way to show your face.
- Answer your DMs — you probably get bombarded by messages from people in your organisation. Is this on the roadmap? Is this a bug? Can you join a call? While I realise it is very time consuming, it’s important to actually reply to those messages, if only to say that you don’t have time currently but would love to discuss this next week. If you don’t people will think you don’t want to help them which I’m sure is not the case.
- Over-communicate and ask people for input — slack people, reply in Jira tickets, set up calls (within reason). When you have a question or need input, don’t always go to the same people, diversify! That way people will get to know you and they’ll feel heard and valued.
Put yourself in their shoes.
Yes, sometimes people ask questions that make you roll your eyes. Yes sometimes they’ll leave borderline rude comments on tickets demanding updates on things they don’t understand. It can suck. But it’s your job to help them understand and to make sure they can field questions and remarks from customers. Remember, you don’t know how their day is going. For all you know they’ve just been shouted at by customers because you don’t support dark mode.
Socialize.
Ask people how they’re doing, if they had a nice weekend and if there’s anything you can do to help them this week. More than our roles we are all just people who need social contact, especially in a remote working world. As the meeting fatigue sets in, we tend to forget the small talk in the hopes that we’ll get back a couple of minutes of our day. But that small talk is what binds us together and makes work about more than just what we get paid to do.
The bottom line? Be nice, considerate, empathetic. It will allow you the leeway to make tough decisions and say things people don’t want to hear (i.e ‘no’) without alienating them.
