Day 48 — Stakeholder series 3/7: “Inquiry & Interview”
Except for the success criteria, what are the important information we need to gather from our stakeholders? How do we get them? What are some important questions we can ask to understand the project risk? In this article, I’d like to share my favorite tools with you, and I hope you’d like it!
Topics covered in this post:
- Product Venn Diagram
- Project Triangle
- Role specific interviews
These are some great tools that can be illustrated in a whiteboard session to identify the key elements of a project. Whether you want to invite your stakeholders and host a session, or simply use them as a mental model, they help us structure the questions we want to ask. So, please read on!
Product Venn Diagram
A simple way to understand stakeholder’s wishes, knowledge, and expectations, is to start with drawing/showing the Product Venn Diagram. The diagram covers these 3 main area:
- User/Customer Goals: It goes without saying that we’d want to understand their goals in order to design something they’d appreciate. If we realize that the team collective don’t have enough insight on this, we might want to start some upfront research to make sure we’re solving the right problem.
- Business Goal: You might be surprised by what you hear! Not every we design/build is going to be as popular as Netflix or Spotify. Sometimes a product is built with a target longevity of 3 months, as a tactical solution. Or a product is going to be used to collect information of some other team as audit tool to eliminate headcounts. It’s important to understand these directions so we don’t over-engineer in every single details.
- Technology Constraints: This is a key factor that affects how are going to design & build it. For example, is there a design system with reusable components in place? If it’s mobile, is it a native app, web app, or hybrid? If it’s web tech, what is the Javascript or chart library we’re going to utilize?
By asking your stakeholders their understanding of the 3 circles, you can write down these general guidelines and use them to as the base for your principle solutions. You might learn that some of the stakeholders might not have thought long & hard about some of these circles. Also, you might also discover that the information collected could vary from one stakeholder to another. In that case, you can invite both parties to sit down and discuss in order align the general direction.
Project Triangle
Product Venn Diagram helps us collect information from stakeholders to determine the product direction. However, the diagram doesn’t really reveal any project logistics. From experience, we learned that sometime the logistics could be a make-or-break factor, so it’s equally important to talk about the project logistics, especially in the beginning of the project. One of my favorite tools is the Project Triangle which consists of 3 main factors:
- Cost
- Time
- Quality
This is a good framework to help stakeholders to think about what they’re trying to achieve in the project. Is it a fixed-time project (delivered for some industry event)? Or a fixed-cost project due to budget issue? What’s expectation on quality (benchmark to what other product)?
In general, if the scope is fixed, then you can only optimize 2 out of the 3 factors in the triangle. For example, if you want it cheap & fast, then the quality will sacrifice. In other words, you can’t have it all 3 ways. This is a helpful tool when you’re getting pressure from stakeholder of change-request. We use the triangle diagram, and say to our stakeholders: “Cheap, Fast, Good, Pick any two.”
“Cheap, fast, good, pick any two” — Project Triangle
16 years ago I was a product manager in a local manufacturer for Nissan Taiwan, and I learned one of the most important aspects in product management — QCDSM, which stands for Quality, Cost, Date, Safety, Morale. These are important factors to actively gauge the status of project to take action upon. The QCD parts are the hard requirement people pay more attention to, and Safety (project risk) & Morale are the soft requirement that people don’t talk often in the stakeholder meeting. However, they are equally important in project managment, especially whe you’re in an Agile team setting, or managing a high performance team.
Role specific interviews
Except for the general guidance we want to get from stakeholders, we also want to learn more in-depth knowledge and probe into the specifics from different team members. Through my experience, I highly recommend Kim Goodwin, author of Designing in the Digital Age, her list of role based interview questionnaire. Below, I’m mixing some of her role-based questions from Kim Goodwin that have been very helpful for me, with some questions I developed throughout the years:
For senior executives
- What do we need to know that you don’t think other members of your team have said?
- What kept you up at night? Any major concern?
- How do we define success of the project?
For subject matter expert (SME)
- What distinctions in user roles and tasks would you expect us to see?
- What sorts of workflows or practices do you think we’ll be seeing in the field?
- What are some pain points for the users you’ve observed? What are some of the things we shouldn’t do?
For engineering team
- What technology decisions have already been made, and what’s driving them?
- Could you draw a diagram and tell me in lay terms how the existing system works? Can you tell me about the tech stack?
- Is there any existing resource we can reuse as leverage?
These key questions can help you understand the project constraints, also hedge the project risk by effectively managing expectations (I’ll expand on this aspect in the next post).
Conclusion
- Product Venn Diagram helps us capture the key characteristics about the products;
- If you’d like to actively manage a project, Project Triangle is a good starting point to understand the logistics, also it serves as a framework to monitor how things go;
- Role based interview helps us dive into details from different perspectives.
What other tools do you use to understand the product form stakeholders’ perspective? I’d like to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
