Most product owners and product managers find themselves constantly reacting to their stakeholders. Answer questions. Respond to emails. Prep for a meeting somebody put on your calendar.
With only a few stakeholders that’s manageable.
More than a few, and it can feel like you’re constantly getting pulled in different directions.
This seems to be especially painful for internal POs. When the users and the users’ stakeholders are in-house, there are just that many more people who have a, well, stake in the product.
It’s tempting to wish you didn’t have so many stakeholders to deal with. But all those stakeholders are an indication of the importance of the work. Initiatives that don’t matter don’t have stakeholders. No one cares.
Your job is to harness your stakeholders’ interest towards a better outcome.
To that end, successful PO’s and PMs don’t just react to stakeholders, they handle stakeholder relationships proactively and strategically. Here’s how…
Who Am I Missing?
The first step in moving from reactive to proactive with your stakeholders is getting clear who they all are. This may seem obvious, but every time we do Stakeholder Interaction Maps in our Advanced CSPO program, someone (usually an internal PO) says, “Wow, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize I had *that many* people to keep up with.”
Consider these questions to brainstorm your stakeholders:
- Who directly uses what we build?
- Who selects and pays for what we build? (maybe users, maybe someone else)
- Who gets users to use what we build? (e.g., marketing and sales)
- Who helps users use what we build? (e.g., support)
- Who benefits from someone else using what we build? (e.g., the user’s customers)
- Who contributes resources for building what we build? (e.g., IT or a vendor)
- Who works to avoid harm coming from the thing that we build? (e.g., compliance)
- Who sets constraints on our solution? (e.g., enterprise architects)
- Who integrates with the thing that we build? (e.g., other teams)
What Do They Really Need?
A big group of stakeholders can be challenging not just because of the time involved in interacting with them but because it feels impossible to please everybody. There’s never enough capacity to just do what everyone’s asking you to do. The way out of that trap is digging below the surface requests to find the underlying needs. There are often breakthrough solutions to meet those diverse needs.
How you do it depends on the kind of stakeholder.
Some stakeholders shape *what* you build. They want to influence the direction of your product. For these, shift the conversation from requests (or requirements or demands) to focusing on the problem to be solved and why it matters. Some useful question here are:
- Last time you wished for
, what were you doing? - If you had
, what would happen next? What outcome would that produce? - How do you/users handle that now?
Some stakeholders shape *how* you build what you build. They want to put constraints around your solution. Dig into the jobs those constraints will do so you can carve out space to be creative.
Some stakeholders shape *when* you build certain things. They shift the sequence of your work. Where there are dependencies, look for ways to break the dependencies or to gain a deeper understanding of why things are scheduled where they are.
How Often Should We Interact?
Stakeholder conversations that happen too late cause rework. Stakeholder conversations that happen too often create noise and waste time. The sweet spot is matching the frequency of interactions to the frequency of change.
For each of your stakeholders, ask yourself: How often do things change on their end that might affect us? How often do things change on our end that might affect them? Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly?
Schedule a meeting or a reminder to reach out to them to match that frequency of change.
Take It To the Next Level
Stakeholder management is a big focus of our Advanced CSPO program.
To help you shift from reactive to proactive and collaborative stakeholder management…
- We go deeper into how to make sense of who your stakeholders are and how they relate to your product.
- We practice having more effective stakeholder conversations to identify underlying needs.
- And we look at how to communicate your strategy and roadmap in a way that gets your stakeholders on your side.
If stakeholder management looms large in your work, join our next A-CSPO cohort here.
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