Communication Strategy on Product/Project Management — I

There are four phases of communication strategy;

• Introduction
• Familiarity
• Acceptance
• Motivation.

These steps are like climbing stairs that you should proceed step by step.

STEP 1: INTRODUCTION PHASE

Why do you want to change?

Dealing with real problems of real problems should be a starting point. Understanding their daily lives is so much important. For the introduction, you should explain;

• Today’s pain points are affecting us deeply. They should agree on these pain points with infographics, numbers, and the real voice of customers.
• This product is not for you but for them.

The selection of a powerful spokesman feeling this problem deeply is so much important, the value of removing this pain point should be understood by all stakeholders.

Future back strategy

If you can show the future, by aligning with current pain-points, stakeholders can perform better participation into product/project objectives to reach this future and stick to target without distracting focus.

Embracing product/project objectives by stakeholders

Actually, I’m not mentioning just embracing communicated objectives, it is crucial that stakeholders should be part of the objectives’ generation. In general, people are more conservative about new things when the time comes to execution, therefore, pain-point perception increment through the company will increase their ownership and enthusiasm.

Communication Focus Group

Steering committee communication is so critical at the beginning because their experience and different perspectives can contribute to your roadmap and priorities at a very high level. Steer-co engagement is so critical because they are providing internal resources like SME’s, and getting urgency and priority from high management will make SME’s stick to product objectives too. Planning 1–1 live meeting with country managers, GM’s, and steer-co is important to the end of the introduction phase.

At the end of the introduction phase, you should plan a meeting or town hall in which you can give a speech chance to everybody for the second phase transition by getting your stakeholders’ power. This will show how high management is supporting this product and its objectives. Thereafter, you can use, physical or digital tools for spreading your objectives through the company with digital screens or marketing standees. You should plan and align with your stakeholders about the content and the frequency of your communication and walk the talk according to plan. Communication is a time-taking work, for that reason should not be underestimated and a pre-determined time-slot in your calendar must be taken place with scheduled meetings with the team.

STEP 2: CREATING FAMILIARITY

Overall awareness

You created awareness for steer-co and high-level stakeholders, but what about overall awareness? At that moment, without losing the wind behind you, you should spread the wind through the company in every geography. This doesn’t mean that you will give up steer-co communication but decreasing the frequency by providing enough content with determined frequency.

While high-level management support generally is significant but execution comes from medium-levels like business process leaders, business process owners, and powerful subject matter experts. Their inclusion in every step makes you faster in terms of execution and increases product engagement and benefit realizations. You can know lots of things but if your root in the ground, your flowers can fade away in a short time, you can lose your business acumen, and this is not a good thing.

Providing information periodically about current/future enterprise capability and release plan, progress, next features, and time plan hold your community alive.

Communication Focus Group

Leadership and GM’s should be informed again with determined decreased schedules, generally with live events quarterly and the updated status report monthly. In terms of sponsor and steer-co communication can be planned as a live event annually, the updated status report quarterly with leader letters.

In that phase, you should create seamless communication with medium-level management like managers and SME’s. Communication should be planned as multi-way. Information sharing and communication shouldn’t be provided only by the product team. While encouraging them to communicate on your behalf will bring ownership, responsibility, and engagements, this will enhance your benefit-realization. As a product team, you have limited touch-points with users and all employees, comparing to SME’s and business process owners. And cascading value communication between management layers cannot be a hundred percent complete without taking their elbow-to-elbow support.

The communication period should be monthly with a live event, bi-weekly with the updated status report covering more detail about capabilities and determined roadmap steps. Another area of responsibility is starting with this phase because your communication group and topic details are growing. Complicated or detailed issues should be communicated in a basic way with explainer videos, one-pager, or interviews. Company social media or digital environments should be used for communication with this audience. You should continue to use digital screens with the same frequency.

STEP 3: ACCEPTANCE

Trust with transparency

Everybody is aware of you and the product, they know milestones and capabilities which brought into the enterprise. But what about “say: do”? Are you walking the talk and informing the community also for failures beyond the success too. While listening to more users and customers, you should know more detail than SME’s and behave more strategically than business process leaders with combining technology and business acumen.

Communication Focus Group

Leadership and GM’s should be informed again with determined more decreased schedules, generally with live events quarterly/bi-quarterly and the updated status report quarterly. In terms of sponsor and steer-co communication can be planned as a live event annually, the updated status report bi-quarterly with leader letters.

BPO and BPL live communication can be decreased as quarterly, with the monthly updated status report.

With this communication stage, studies of user and employee engagement are starting, they should be perceived as product input providers. More detailed information should be shared with booklets or videos, hosting Q&A sessions and webinars. In order to create a constant feedback loop, polls should be used for empathy.

STEP 4: MOTIVATION

If you came till here, perfect! Congratulations!

Everybody is on the same page and is happy about your communication methods.

Annual live event and quarterly release & benefits report sharing are enough for high management and quarterly live event and release document is enough for SMEs and middle-level management as a communication strategy.

This phase will let people from every management level speak on your and your product's behalf. You and they will tell their success stories and you will provide these stories to spread through the company. You will show new enterprise capabilities and abilities frequently. You will focus on empathy, you will spend all your time in the field, you will listen to the market, and will create value for all. You will celebrate yourself and your users at every milestone.