Negotiation Advice for Product Managers
What to do when your customer wants a purple armchair, but your supplier only has pencils for sale?
This is a story of a time when I felt stuck like a rock in a hard place, between my customer’s hopes and dreams (à la purple armchair) and my supplier who was adamant that the only thing available for sale was a pencil.
In product management it’s important to be able to synthesise information, influence without authority and negotiate to keep things moving forwards. I find it’s usually a good idea to take the time to understand where people are coming from, particularly when there are opposing views, or you’re hearing “that just can’t be done”.
Start by listening
I often catch myself peering past the words and looking for those subtle cues to deeply and truly understand what someone is trying to say. A big part of this comes down to knowing your audience. Here are some of the questions I ask myself whilst attempting to listen actively:
- How much knowledge do they have on the topic?
- What assumptions are they making?
- Why might they believe what they are saying is correct?
- Do they understand the problem we’re trying to solve?
- What is it about their view that others may not understand?
- Are there non-verbal signs? Tone, body language, deviation from their norm.
- Could there be a hidden motivation?
- What are they not saying?
Confirm what you think you’ve heard
Once you’ve asked enough questions and got sufficient information to be able to understand both sides of the story, start playing it back to confirm that your understanding is accurate. Be careful to take a neutral tone and stick to facts where possible to avoid being perceived as taking sides. When playing it back it’s important to pause and allow space for the other person to correct you and add anything they feel may have been left out.
Get to the root of the problem
There’s numerous articles out there about getting to the root of the problem, I like the 5 Whys, so I’m not going to cover that here.
In the fore mentioned story, the reason my customer wanted a purple armchair is that:
- They believed it would be easiest, most comfortable product for their end customers to adopt.
- It was similar to what they’d had before.
- When shopping around the Internet they saw competitors offering similar products.
- They thought that they would have to live with the purple armchair for many years to come so they wanted to be 110% sure they got it right upfront.
The reason that my supplier was only willing to offer up a pencil for sale was:
- Over the last year, laws had been tightened to restrict the way goods are sold.
- Their competitors had received fines for using particular wording when describing their products in advertising material.
- They feared the risk of a big fine and reputational damage, both for the customer and themselves, if they were inadvertently perceived as advertising anything other than a pencil.
- The customer was new business to them and they did not want to jeopardise the relationship early on, nor did they want to risk damaging the customer’s brand.
Negotiating a win-win outcome
Bringing together divergent, or conflicting opinions and leading without authority to negotiate an outcome is truly an art form. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet and/or one size fits all approach to negotiating, but it is a critical skill for Product Managers to have in their toolkit.
A negotiation technique to try with your team
A negotiation technique I’ve used which is more appropriate for internal teams is to get both sides to argue against their original position.
For example, if Mary wants to paint the wall blue but Jake is adamant it should be red, and neither is willing to compromise you could try this approach.
- Create a safe space and ask the team if it’s okay to try something new?
- Describe that we’re going to try a little exercise to see if we can better understand each other’s perspectives.
- Reassure everyone that it’s not personal, it may be a tad uncomfortable but we’re in this together and can find a way forward.
- Acknowledge that Mary wants to paint the wall blue. Ask her to put that aside for one minute and argue why the wall should be painted red? Why is painting it red a good idea?
- Next, acknowledge Jake wants to paint the wall red. Ask him to put that aside for one minute and argue why the wall should be painted blue? Why is painting it blue a good idea?
- Hopefully this is when the magic starts to happen. It becomes less about Mary’s opinion, or Jake’s opinion and the team as a whole can see multiple perspectives and talk through the best way forward.
- If you’re successful you’ll find that the team has landed on a decision and better yet it won’t be Mary’s idea or Jake’s idea, it’ll be the team that decided the best approach (in this case a colour).
Pro tip: in the above exercise, if (when) someone starts to disagree and say “But I’ve already told you X is better than Z!”, simply acknowledge that with “Yes, I understand you prefer X but I’d like you to have an open mind for a minute and see if you can find a way to see why Z might be a viable option?”.
Bringing it all together
In the above example once I got to the root of the problem from both the customer (purple armchair) and supplier (pencil) side, I was able to present this individually to each party.
Both sides were then able to see that the other party did in fact have the customer’s best interests at heart and were attempting to do the right thing. They were just approaching it from a slightly different angle.
The end result
We had a tight time constraint to work with and in the end I was able to negotiate a middle ground between the purple armchair and the pencil - call it an old book splashed with purple paint and a paint brush…?
The final product was skewed slightly towards the supplier side given our legal obligations, and to minimise upfront risk. We arrived at an agreed starting place which was rather conservative, on the agreement that it would not be set in stone forever and would be revisited over the weeks to follow. Thus alleviating some of the customer’s concerns that it was set in stone forever. The customer also appreciated that the supplier was sharing their expertise and doing their best to preserve the integrity of their reputation and the customer’s.
The art of negotiation and translation
Being a Product Manager doesn’t mean you have to have all of the answers. In fact most of the time you won’t. In my experience >90% of the time other people already have the answer. They just aren’t always able to communicate it effectively and may have difficulty seeing someone else’s point of view.
Your role as a Product Manager is to communicate effectively, extract information and help others get their point across, especially when they aren’t able to deliver it themselves. When decisions need to be made you’ll have to negotiate with others and influence without authority. Remember product management is a team sport and working through ambiguity with disparate stakeholders and conflicting points of view is half the fun 😃
Over to you
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I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.
P.S: if anyone decides to try the negotiating technique, what did or didn’t work and how might you improve on it? Bonus points for anyone that can find the source as I can’t recall where I first learned about it…
