6 Product Manager Essentials For Securing Stakeholder Buy-In
If you have ever felt you’ve pitched the perfect game to stakeholders and come up short, you know what it feels like. You’ve put your performance under the microscope and have probably thought:
“It makes sense to me, why don’t the stakeholders see that?”
“Did I sell the statistics well enough?”
“What more could I have said?”
You’re not alone either. In fact, managing stakeholders is one of the biggest roles (and pains) in a Product Manager’s duties, made no easier by the fact you’re dealing with conflicting priorities and internal politics on top!
What’s worse is getting stakeholder buy-in just isn’t an exact science because, at the end of the day, you are convincing people. And people with different opinions, values and motivations guiding them about what they think the product direction should be.
But luckily there are ways Product Managers can improve their chances out of the gate. Check out 6 things you can do next time you’re angling for stakeholder buy-in below.
At a glance: What Can Help Get Stakeholder Buy-In:
- Relate Back to the Product Vision and Strategy
- Stakeholder Mapping (and HiPPO management)
- Conduct Alignment Workshops
- Compile Compelling Data and Stories
- Deliver Visual Evidence
- Provide Accountability Metrics
1. Relate Back to the Product Vision and Strategy
Now product strategy and product vision statements may already be baked into your company, but creating and or framing the strategy and vision with what you are needing buy-in for can go a long way to supporting your cause.
Why? Because if the strategy and vision is already agreed, your stakeholders should already buy into those values, making tactics and actions that support it easier to agree to.
For disclosure:
- A ‘product vision’ is the ‘essence of your product’, delivering a simplified, actionable and aspirational that links to your corporate objectives.
- A ‘product strategy’ on the other hand is a ‘high-level plan describing what the business hopes to accomplish with its product and how it plans to do so’.
Having both provides stakeholders with clarity about:
- Who your target is
- What you’re doing
- Why you’re doing it
- How it links to your corporate objectives
- What the product roadmap will be dictated by
As a result of knowing the product vision and strategy, you can take a temperature check on your tactical proposals before they reach the buy-in stage to test if they stand a chance.
2. Stakeholder Mapping
Common mistake: Not all people in your company are stakeholders. You don’t have to appease and ask for permission from everyone.
You just need to be aware of the people who can make or break your plans, who will be particularly interested and who will be affected by what you do.
After all, you wouldn’t build a product without knowing your target audience and addressing their needs, so don’t fall into that trap with stakeholders.
Enter the classic stakeholder matrix where you can place each party within the four quadrants to determine actions needed:
- Monitor: [Low interest and low power]: Keep irregular contact and engagement. Minimum management, but keep aware of parties within this section as they may change over the course of the project, most likely into having higher interest. E.g. involved due to a promotion.
- Keep Informed [High interest and low power]: It’s important to maintain their interest in the Product team’s activities in achieving buy-in. This could be your team considering they will have a vested interest in the Product team’s success, but don’t have the power to give it the go-ahead themselves.
- Keep Satisfied [Low interest and high power]: You need to understand their goals due to their high authority on decisions, but they aren’t 100% interested in the day-to-day elements that will affect your product decision.
- Manage Closely [High interest and high power]: The most important stakeholders, a mix of high influence (power in the company/sway over the department) and high interest (will be effected by the outcomes). Maintaining their interest and engaging them regularly will make a big difference.
By plotting your stakeholders, you can prioritise parties according to their importance to your plans and create an engagement plan you can stick to throughout.
TIP: Beware, not every decision relies on the same stakeholders every time. You may need to re-evaluate when personnel change or the goal changes. We’ve had workshops with different teams before where specific roles held more sway over others depending on the focus of the project.
TIP: HiPPO’s pose a MASSIVE risk to buy-in for stakeholders. Not the huge mammal, but the ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion’. You know the type, the person who has the final say due to their position or can sink your plans no matter the data or stakeholder backing you have otherwise. They often fall in the ‘Actively Engage’ quadrant, so be prepared to roll up your sleeves to get this stakeholder on side.
Once you know your stakeholders, you can then apply that to…
3. Conduct Alignment Workshops
It may sound like a fad or gimmicky, but alignment workshops do have their place.
‘84% of Product Managers believe that cross-functional collaboration is critical in leading a product to success’. The issue is that the collaboration often comes without initial alignment as a team, leading to confusion and teams diverging.
The clever guys at Mind the Product say that alignment is about helping people ‘understand the issues and their respective roles.’ with the end goal of creating a shared understanding to help make decisions.
Alignment workshops that encourage the Product team and stakeholders to discuss goals, strategy and more can help foster mutual understanding, make collaboration easier, rationalise your decisions to the stakeholders directly and puts the foundations in for trust.
The format for discussion and engagement makes the most difference when there’s resistance to change or if the company structure has left a stakeholder siloed, helping you close the understanding gap person-to-person.
“… if you know that you’re going to be having a big impact in someone’s space and you want to hear from them, it’s good to set that meeting up early when you’ve got some clarity but it’s not fully fleshed otu so you can fold in their concerns… — Megan Cook, Head of Product at Atlassian.
4. Compile Compelling Data and Stories
Let’s say you’ve made it to presentation time. You could rely on your gift of the gab to talk your way through it, but relying solely on what you think is right is a big trap door you want to side step.
People in higher power categories want your claims backed up before committing trust and budget to a product direction, strategy or a costly tactic. This is where facts and stories come in.
“Things get done only if the data we gather can inform and inspire those in a position to make a difference.” — Mike Schmoker
Data contributes to painting the bigger picture to your stakeholders via:
- Reviews
- Surveys
- Market reports
- Screen recordings
- User research on prototypes
- Competitor reviews
But data alone doesn’t guarantee success, because again, you’re dealing with people. Numbers alone don’t pain pictures that inspire buy-in.
This is where grounding your data in meaning (this metric means this) and marrying your facts against established personas works best. Bottom line: Don’t just rest on stats speaking for themselves, frame your solutions with context and this should help you increase your odds.
5. Deliver Visual Evidence
Now although data and stories alone can work, they don’t always get you across the line.
Part of securing buy-in is selling your ideas in a way that stakeholders can visualise (if you’ve ever seen those cheesy mockups of what a street or building might look like when it’s been completed, you’ll know what we mean). After all, we judge things on five senses, and hearing something doesn’t always translate fully.
This is where physical evidence comes in. Wireframes, mock ups or full blown high fidelity prototypes can turn the tide (read about different prototypes here), illustrating the end goal in a way statistics and talk can’t alone.
This aims to help ease trust issues and bridge the communication gap between those who prefer statistics and those who prefer to see tangible evidence of what’s being proposed.
6. Provide Accountability Metrics
Presenting a vision, strategy or idea to stakeholders to get buy-in, especially at the higher end of the power spectrum, without providing solid KPIs and metrics is the equivalent of saying “it’ll work, trust me”.
Accountability safeguards and targets helps put trust back on the table, giving the stakeholders clarity over what will constitute success or failure.
Always build presentations and conversations about gaining buy-in with the knowledge that you have plans for how you will show you’re on the right track.
These will be different depending on who your stakeholders are, e.g. Sales will want to see how sales targets are built in, but having a range of relevant and appealing metrics for your stakeholder base can make conversations easier.
