Stakeholder Management For Engineering Leads
Running a successful engineering team is like navigating a busy city center. In the heart of the city, your team connects ideas, needs, and results. Stakeholder management is the map you need to avoid gridlock and ensure everyone gets where they need to go, more-or-less on time. Let’s explore three areas important for good stakeholder management: clear communication, smart decision-making amid limited resources, and being flexible when plans change.
Clear Signals
Imagine managing a project is like driving through traffic. Clear signals are crucial for everyone to understand what’s going on and where they need to go. Good communication hygiene helps everyone involved — from business sponsors to junior engineers — understand their roles, receive updates, and provide feedback.
Let’s say you’re managing a project to improve the performance of web app. A good approach might be to give your engineering leader (e.g. director, VP, CTO, etc) detailed updates about the bottlenecks and the ways you’re addressing them (e.g. framework or library updates, caching, etc). At the same time, you’d need to make sure the business team knows how these changes might affect their staff. You could also get feedback from customers through testing sessions to better understand their needs and concerns.
Staying on Track
Running an engineering team can feel like a juggling act. You’ve got multiple tasks in the air, and you’re trying to keep them all going while moving forward. When bandwidth is low, you have to decide what get’s done, and make sure everyone understands why some tasks get more attention than others.
For example, imagine you have to choose between adding a new feature or fixing a security issue due to limited resources. You would make the security issue a priority because it’s essential to keep customer data safe and to reduce business liability. Once that’s done, you can then focus on enhancing the product’s capabilities. It’s important to explain these decisions to stakeholders so they understand why features take as long as they do to build.
Adapting to Change
In any business, change is inevitable. Successful engineering teams adapt to these changes rather than resist them.
Say your team was developing a tool to help shoppers find their way around physical stores. But then, the focus of the business shifts to online shopping. Your team would need to quickly adjust and find ways to make the tool useful for virtual shopping.
Of course, this isn’t always feasible, but find what you can repurpose. For example, maybe the tool you’ve built is backed by a service that holds data on product inventory. You can imagine how such a service could power a virtual shopping experience as well. Create leverage by turning a potential setback into a new opportunity.
When big changes like this happen, it’s crucial to talk openly with stakeholders. You need to explain why the change is happening, the benefits of the new direction, the potential risks, and the steps you’re taking to mitigate these risks.
In the end, stakeholder management is all about clear communication, smart decision-making, and flexibility. By practicing these skills, your engineering team will be better equipped to juggle tasks effectively and keep stakeholders happy.
The learning continues in…
- Chapter 1 — How Engineering Managers can understand their team better
- Chapter 2 — The Power of Iterative Roadmap Planning in Tech Teams
- Chapter 3 — Building Trust and Alignment with Your Manager
- Chapter 4 — Facilitating Cross-Team Projects For Engineering Managers
- Chapter 5 — How Engineering Managers Can Reduce Throw-Away Work
- Chapter 6 — Stakeholder Management For Engineering Leads
If you have any thoughts or experiences to add, let me know! Respond to this post or let me know on LinkedIn. I’m happy to talk about anything software engineering related.
