How to prevent stakeholders from killing your product?
6 rules that will help you build a great Product thanks to a healthy stakeholder relationship.
When I joined ManoMano (leading European platform for DIY and gardening) as a Product Manager in early 2017, there were only 15 developers and 3 product people in the Tech team. I joined the company in the middle of a 1-year code freeze that enabled us to migrate our PHP framework and set up strong foundations for the next 5 years. During this migration, as you can imagine, stakeholders were very frustrated: they were asked to reach ambitious objectives with zero IT resources available. Believe me, as soon as this migration was over, it was a real challenge to collect and prioritize ideas and requests coming directly from about 100 individuals with no established filtering processes. The context also did not help: There was no clear company vision at this time and we were not very good at setting objectives that align everyone. For many months, this context created a lot of noise slowing down Product teams and preventing them from creating the value they should have. Fortunately, this did not last long enough to kill our Product!
Since then, we have been lucky enough to experience tremendous growth: The business grew by 620%, our IT teams are now well-staffed and we have a strong Product team of 20 people working in Feature Teams. The past years of growth and structuration gave me the opportunity to experience many ways of working effectively with stakeholders: I definitely made many mistakes but I have also learned a lot.
Before sharing what I have learned with you, let’s start with a caveat: This article is not about tips to fool your stakeholders or about tricks to convince them you are the smartest person in the room. Let’s be clear; if your intention is to build a great product, you will need stakeholders’ inputs, influence, and support, as much as you will need to talk often to your users. Business owners have an area of expertise that you must leverage and they sometimes know better than you some parts of your product. If you have no clear strategy leading to an effective collaboration with stakeholders, you open the way for painful working relationships that many product managers often complain about, or even worse, you risk building a product that fails. Even if we sometimes have to deal with pushy, stressed or unhelpful business owners, in my opinion, it is the PM’s responsibility to create the conditions of a great collaboration. Many stakeholders you will work with initially do not understand how Product/IT teams work; it is your responsibility to educate them.
Here are 6 rules that will help you build a great Product thanks to a healthy stakeholder relationship.
1. Setup your product vision and challenge your management on company goals
At ManoMano, we made a lot of mistakes when defining our teams' objectives and frankly, it cost us a lot in terms of time and money. It is quite easy to align teams when there are less than 100 people in a company but it becomes trickier as you grow. We implemented OKRs early on but there were too many: At that time, our understaffed teams could not realistically reach the outcomes we were aiming at. We have iterated a lot on this and it is working way better today! When objectives are unrealistic, not clear enough or not shared between teams, you can really feel it as a PM: It will make your job a nightmare! You will end up designing for consensus of internal people and this will ultimately put your product at risk. In a digital company, most of these OKRs will require dev bandwidth: With no alignment, the PMs will end up overwhelmed by meetings or dev requests and they will waste a lot of energy in trying to balance conflicting goals. Your Product team cannot work effectively and deliver true value by dispersing its efforts; this is all the more true with software development where building things requires focus.
There are two levers to make sure the Product Team and the stakeholders go in the same direction:
- First, check for signs of mis-alignment in your organization. If there are any, make sure you weigh in and ask until goals are defined. For instance, if you need your Sales team’s support to make the feature you are working on adopted by end customers, it is a good idea to make sure you share an OKR with them. You will need to work with your management in order to better align teams. It can be very powerful when all your teams have the same goal for a month or quarter: people will be more inclined to work together and frictions will rarify. We have experienced this momentum several times at ManoMano which enabled us to make great product releases in a very short period of time.
- Work on a product vision that inspires and is challenged until you have the feeling that everyone is aligned with it. And evangelize your product vision on a regular basis; repetition is a good friend. For instance, I like to start every end of Sprint Demo with a reminder of our Feature Team mission.
2. Explain your job and demonstrate empathy
The first thing I do when interacting with a new stakeholder is trying to understand what their level of knowledge is about agile methodologies, software, and product management. Do not take this for granted; many people still see developers as teams who execute their ideas and the product manager as the person to lead the projects (or worse, a scribe or proxy). Even if at ManoMano we have a digital native population, only 10% of new recruits say they have worked with product people before.
I found that the best way to make them change their minds and understand your work is involving them and showing them the complexity. Eventually, they will figure out that an idea is one thing and the actual execution is another. At ManoMano, we did a great job in involving business owners in our Feature Teams’ life. And Scrum Masters can support PMs with this process (learn more about ManoMano Agile organization). Here are some of the initiatives that could help you build empathy between teams:
- Explain and illustrate your product design methodology: jobs to be done, problem space, solutions… Take an example JTBD and list the 10+ possible solutions. They will better understand your job and why picking the right solution is hard;
- Adapt the office sitting plan to get your feature team sitting with the business team related to the project they work on. This will favor interactions and help teams to understand each other;
- Invite stakeholders to Sprint Demos, make them participate in the debates and value their feedback by sending meeting notes afterwards;
- Show the hidden work and share what is going on backstage so that business owners can see the work being done, on monitoring, quality assurance automation,… They will be more interested than you think and will better understand why things take more time than they thought initially;
- Make them test the code with you before a big product release: At ManoMano we gather them in a “test room” with the developers. It helps them better understand the complexity behind software development and see all the small details that the team needs to cover;
- Co-build solutions. Design Sprint is a great tool but if your stakeholders cannot dedicate so much time, you can still ask for their feedback on mockups, make them test your prototypes…;
- Explain what is a Minimum Viable Product. Often, stakeholders want to add many product features to maximize the success of the launch of the feature. This is something difficult to overcome as it touches peoples’ insecurities. Again, take the time to explain: What is the best option? To bring value in 3 weeks to 80% of the users or to bring value in 2 months to 95% of the users?
These are examples but all initiatives that can help business owners understand your job will ultimately help you build trust. And trust is the key: As soon as you get it, discussions will progressively move from feature request negotiations to something driving more value for your Product.
As a Product Manager, your job is NOT to try to satisfy all stakeholders (see our great article about The six temptations of a product manager) and most of the time it is to say no. This is crucial if you want to make major product breakthrough (10x thinking) and move away from numerous local optimizations that consume a lot of time but ultimately generate not so much value. That said, it is important to show respect, listen and educate them on the choices made. Put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholder; it can be very annoying to face the same issue 20 times a day on an internal tool! Caring for them are prerequisites for achieving great things together; you cannot lead people if you are not interested in them! If you don’t, it is quite unlikely they will trust and follow you. Show the same interest you need to demonstrate to your users!
3. Adapt your communication
Not all stakeholders are equally important for your Product. Still, all stakeholders think they are important. It is human nature, do not try to fight it. Some stakeholders have veto power, some are not aligned with your team goals, others are just obsessed with very specific problems. You should position yourself differently depending on your interlocutor and know when to dedicate time to them and when not to. At ManoMano, we officialized a Business Owner role. Each feature team has a dedicated and shortlist of business owners they work with from relevant services in the company. Business owners are co-responsible with the Product Manager for Product success and attend project kick-offs and product workshops. They also sync operations related to your product releases and group and prioritize dev needs coming from their business unit: It is a very useful first filter that saves a lot of time for PMs.
Having a discussion with the management to identify the relevant business owners will help you find the right people in whom you should invest the most time with. List all the people that are naturally interacting with you and start building a mental map of them. The stakeholders you should spend the most time with and meet in-person regularly are the ones with a strong influence and who are aligned with the goals of your team. They will have a natural interest in what you are doing and be willing to invest time. Try to redirect “not-so-important” stakeholders to the designated Business Owner when possible or prefer asynchronous communications with them. If everyone in the company inundates you with ideas, your agenda will be packed with costly meetings preventing you from taking the step back you need to build a strong product vision.
4. Make sure stakeholders respect your time
Your ability to build knowledge about your market, users, and Product is something really important if you want to be a great product manager. In big companies with many potential stakeholders, non-stop incoming feature requests can create a lot of noise, consume your time and, become a great impediment in building product knowledge. This is very natural, people have ideas and want to do things. Do not blame them for this. On the contrary, your job is actually to make sure ideas come to your ears. That said, your stakeholders cannot expect multiple people to spend long hours working on their brand new idea rather than all of the other tasks they had planned to do. Make no concession with this or you will end up doing their job. One week of work for a Feature Team can cost the company +$20k. No stakeholder would ask a CEO to sign a contract with an external provider for a similar amount without accompanying it with justification. It should be the same internally; ask your business owner to build a strong feature request pitch, guide them in the process if needed, help them describe and refine the problem to resolve, ask for ROI rather than opinions, help them consider companies that provide the feature as a service, make comparisons with other priorities to make them understand the trade-offs involved…
Do not compensate for the lack of context by building it for them. If they find that doing their homework represents too much work, perhaps they should reconsider the urgency of the request. If problems or requests they put on the table are not tied to company goals of your feature team north star metric, show interest (they could be someday) but be clear right away so that your stakeholders do not waste too much time. In our product team at ManoMano, we also tried to batch interactions with business owners in order to minimize micro-interruptions (setting up “no-meeting” half days).
5. Act like an entrepreneur
The best way to gain authority against your stakeholders is to act as an entrepreneur. This will progressively increase your mandate. It will not happen overnight and believe me it requires a lot of time and effort. However, this is the mindset that makes great Product Managers. If you have a clear product vision, are really obsessed with your product, talking to users frequently, knowing your market by heart, are alert on market innovations you should progressively gain authority. For instance, do not let your Sales team be the only one interacting with users; do it yourself and build your own user knowledge.
But what does it mean to act like an entrepreneur? It means a lot of personal investment for sure, but it also means you should not ask for permission: Make your own plan and test things with your team; it could lead to major product discoveries. Take responsibility, show love and care for the Product or you will become (or remain) part of someone else’s plan!
6. Have lunch with key stakeholders!
Let’s finish with a piece of advice easier to implement but as valuable. Meetings are good to discuss things with your stakeholders and personally I find great value in 1-on-1. The limit of these meetings is that you will always have a set agenda and a time constraint. Innovation and breakthrough ideas rarely come from formal meetings. Take time to have lunch or share a beer with your colleagues: you will have more time to sympathize, share experiences (work-related or not) and build long term business relationships.
As a product manager it is vital you find an efficient process of working with all different cross-functional teams in order to build a successful product. You will need to adapt your strategy depending on your organization, its size, the persons you are interacting with, their expectations… And when you work in a company with the pace of growth we experience at ManoMano, you will need to constantly adapt this strategy. But take a step back and make sure you always have a plan.
You cannot afford a bad relationship with your stakeholders or your Product will suffer ultimately. If you are in a digital company such as ManoMano, stakeholders cannot do much without IT/Product teams: as a result, most of the time they are not fully autonomous and they need you to make progress on projects. They will become angry quickly if they do not understand your choices or how your team is working: it is your mission to take them onboard!
I hope you find some nice ideas to play with: you will see, most of the time, stakeholders are curious and show great enthusiasm in adding their contribution to improving the Product with your team! Make sure they have a positive influence on your Product…rather than defining it.
And you, what are your best practices when working with stakeholders as a PM? Feel free to share them in the comments!
Special thanks to Nicolas Martin, Clément Caillol, Chloé Martinot and Pierre Fournier for proofreading and suggestions.
