product

How to Manage Stakeholders

Summary

Learn how to effectively collaborate with stakeholders and prioritize features on your product roadmap to achieve product success in the competitive tech landscape.

Product management involves working with diverse stakeholders, including customers, team members, senior leadership, investors, and even regulatory bodies. Effectively collaborating with these stakeholders is crucial for product managers as it helps in aligning expectations, ensuring a shared vision, and fostering a collaborative environment throughout the product development process.

Types of Stakeholders

Who your stakeholders are depends on your industry. Here's a typical list of stakeholders for a new product at your startup.

Internal Stakeholders

Founder(s) - aligns the product with the business' mission
Executive team - understands the implications of the product for the business
Product lead or owner - owns the vision of the product
UX designers - considers the user's experience
Engineers - considers the technical capabilities and limitations of the product
Customer success - understands how the product may be received by the target audience

External Stakeholders

Existing customers - looking for immediate value from the new feature or product
Prospective customers - considers the new product as a reason to purchase
Media - considers how the new product contributes to the ecosystem and serves the target audience

Laying the Foundation: Building Strong Relationships with Stakeholders

To ensure successful collaboration in product management, it's essential to establish and maintain strong stakeholder relationships. The following strategies can help achieve this:

Embrace Open and Regular Communication

Open, regular communication helps build trust, ensure alignment, and resolve potential misunderstandings or conflicts. Schedule recurring meetings with stakeholders, provide timely updates on the product's progress, and be transparent about any challenges or changes that may arise.

Gain a Deep Understanding of Stakeholder Needs and Expectations

Understanding the needs, expectations, and concerns of stakeholders is essential for effective collaboration. Engage in active listening and empathize with their perspectives to better address their concerns and incorporate their feedback into the product development process.

Develop a Shared Vision

Creating a shared vision among stakeholders ensures everyone is working towards the same goal. Collaborate with stakeholders to define the product's objectives, target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs), aligning these goals with broader organizational objectives.

Prioritizing Features on Your Product Roadmap

With a solid foundation of stakeholder relationships, product managers can effectively prioritize features on their product roadmap. Consider the following strategies to guide this process:

Adopt a Prioritization Framework

A prioritization framework offers an objective method for evaluating and ranking features based on their impact, effort, and alignment with strategic goals. Popular prioritization frameworks include:

MoSCoW: Categorizing features as Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, or Won't-have.
RICE: Scoring features based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.
Value vs. Effort: Plotting features on a matrix with value on the y-axis and effort on the x-axis.

Choose a framework that suits your team's needs and preferences, and use it consistently to facilitate objective decision-making.

Gather Stakeholder Input

Collecting input from stakeholders helps product managers make more informed decisions about feature prioritization. Conduct surveys, hold focus groups, or organize brainstorming sessions to solicit stakeholder feedback on potential features. Make sure to consider diverse perspectives and weigh the pros and cons of each suggestion.

Find the Balance Between Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

Balancing short-term and long-term goals is crucial when prioritizing features. While addressing immediate customer needs and achieving quick wins is essential, product managers must also allocate resources to strategic initiatives that drive long-term growth and success.

Keep Your Product Roadmap Up to Date

A product roadmap is a living document that should be reviewed and updated regularly to reflect changes in priorities, market conditions, and stakeholder feedback. Continuously refining the roadmap ensures it remains relevant and aligned with the product's overall goals and vision.

Managing Stakeholder Expectations Throughout the Product Development Process

Effectively managing stakeholder expectations is essential throughout the product development process. Implement the following strategies for successful expectation management:

Set Realistic Expectations

Be transparent about the product's scope, timeline, and resources from the outset. Set realistic expectations for what can be achieved and communicate any changes or delays promptly, providing clear explanations for the reasoning behind them.

Cultivate a Collaborative and Inclusive Environment

Encourage an environment where stakeholders feel comfortable sharing their ideas, concerns, and feedback. Involve stakeholders in the decision-making process and demonstrate that their input is valued and respected.

Celebrate Successes and Learn from Failures

Acknowledge and celebrate the achievements and milestones reached during the product development process. At the same time, be transparent about any setbacks or failures and use them as opportunities to learn, iterate, and improve.

Navigating Challenging Stakeholder Conversations

Challenging conversations with stakeholders may arise, particularly when addressing conflicting priorities or resource constraints. Here are some tips for navigating these difficult discussions:

Be Prepared

Before entering any challenging conversation, ensure that you have a clear understanding of the context, facts, and figures. Being well-prepared will enable you to address stakeholder concerns confidently and provide well-reasoned explanations for your decisions.

Stay Calm and Professional

Maintain a calm and professional demeanor when faced with difficult conversations. Listen actively to stakeholder concerns, and acknowledge their emotions and perspectives without becoming defensive or combative.

Seek Common Ground

In cases where stakeholders have conflicting priorities or opinions, try to identify areas of common ground that can serve as a foundation for compromise or collaboration. Focus on shared goals and objectives, and explore creative solutions that can satisfy multiple stakeholders.

Follow Up

After a challenging conversation, be sure to follow up with stakeholders to reaffirm your commitment to addressing their concerns and working together to achieve a successful outcome. This helps to maintain trust and open lines of communication throughout the product development process.

Leveraging Stakeholder Expertise to Enhance Your Product

Stakeholders can bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the product development process. Here are some ways product managers can leverage stakeholder expertise to enhance their product offerings:

Encourage Cross-Functional Collaboration

Foster an environment where team members from various departments or disciplines can collaborate on product development tasks. This cross-functional collaboration can lead to innovative ideas, insights, and solutions that might not have been discovered in isolation.

Organize Knowledge-Sharing Sessions

Hold regular knowledge-sharing sessions, such as workshops, seminars, or webinars, where stakeholders can share their insights and expertise with the broader team. This can help to deepen the team's understanding of the product's context, user needs, and market dynamics, ultimately leading to better-informed decisions.

Establish Mentoring Relationships

Encourage stakeholders to serve as mentors to team members, providing guidance, support, and expertise in their respective areas. This can help to build team members' skills and knowledge, while also fostering stronger relationships between stakeholders and the product team.

By effectively collaborating with stakeholders, building strong relationships, and prioritizing features on the product roadmap, product managers can create user-centric products that resonate with their target audience and drive success in the competitive tech landscape.