A Roadmap Hostage Crisis: 5 Negotiation Tactics To Save Your Product
In the movie Inside Man, Denzel Washington plays an NYPD hostage negotiator named Keith Frazier who is in the midst of a tense hostage crisis. He’s up against Clive Owen’s clever bank-robber character, Dalton Russell, who introduces himself as such:
My name is Dalton Russell. Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself. I’ve told you my name: that’s the Who. The Where could most readily be described as a prison cell. But there’s a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being in prison. The What is easy: recently I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery. That’s also the When. As for the Why: beyond the obvious financial motivation, it’s exceedingly simple… because I can. Which leaves us only with the How; and therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.
Does life as a product manager feel like an ongoing hostage crisis? Are you constantly pleading with a company full of Daltons in order to secure the fate of your product?
Yeah, it’s tough. Even for Denzel.
Secretly, you are thinking what Keith Fazier threatened during the 24-hour standoff in the movie…
Until I talk to them, they get nothing, not even a cup of coffee.
In your case, customers are ‘them’, and you need to be sure they’re protected. Your stakeholders are ‘they’, all the folks in leadership, sales, marketing, engineering, support and otherwise who all have ideas of their own. And in between you are the negotiator whose job it is to get the product out the door!
You need to free your company’s product roadmap from the on-going standoffs: fact versus opinion, data versus gut-feel, and market needs versus feature ideas. If you fail, the product could flop. If you triumph, you can deliver an experience that thrills your customers. The clock is ticking, so let’s get right to it!
Here are five tactics I’ve adapted to managing products throughout my career, especially in emotionally charged and often complex environments.
5 Negotiation Tactics To #WinProduct
Tactic 1: Get to know your stakeholders & build rapport
Within the context of the product that you manage, form a clear understanding of your stakeholder landscape. Get to know them and their view of the customer. Treat it like every detail matters, because in a hostage crisis, it does.
Action: Map your internal stakeholders relative to their influence, impact and value to your product and the customer. Then prioritize and start spending time with each of them before a roadmap crisis occurs.
Pro Tip: Ask to join a routine team meeting as a “fly on the wall”.
Outcome: Trust and respect for you as a steward of the company’s product
Tactic 2: Mirror your stakeholder’s perspectives and needs
This one is closely related to #1 in that you need to put in the time to understand your stakeholders to do this effectively. In business negotiations there is often emphasis on ‘mirroring the other person’s behavior’ : mimicking accents, speech patterns, facial expressions, and body language are proven to reach a better outcome for all parties.
Action: Tag the features and ideas in your backlog with the stakeholder groups each impacts, and then maintain notes on these relationships (how these stakeholders talk about the feature both in words and emotions, how the feature impacts their view of the customer, etc.).
Pro Tip: Adopt some of the a stakeholder’s exact language in a future conversation to gain common ground
Outcome: Represent the voice of your customer from multiple perspectives across the company. It’s like you are bilingual!
Tactic 3: Emphasize the potential of your product
The use of performance data to demonstrate the success a product or feature is certainly of high value, but that often only reflects the past. Using performance data paired with customer insights helps to project the future potential of a product and captures the attention and emotion of your stakeholders.
Action: Make time to gather market data and customer insights to formulate new hypotheses for your product. What if our product did X? And then back X by testing low-fi prototypes to gather initial customer validation.
Pro Tip: You don’t need the permission from the business to learn more about your market and test look-a-like customers. Solutions these days like Alpha and UserVoice make gathering customer insights fairly turn-key and relatively affordable.
Outcome: You help paint a picture and tell a data-driven story about where your product can go, not where it has been.
Tactic 4: Put all the cards (features) on the table
Let’s face it, most of your stakeholders are siloed and never really see the full picture of your product and its impact to your customers. Make it your mission to help them see the forest through the trees by laying out the vision of your product as clearly as possible.
Action: Introduce a theme-based roadmap. Check out the Product Roadmap 101 article below by ProdPad.
Pro Tip: Publish your roadmap and make it visible and accessible across the company. Sunlight does wonders for communication and coordination.
Outcome: Transparency is a powerful negotiation lever if you are the one creating and enabling it across all parties involved.
Tactic 5: Take the lead and build a customer-oriented product roadmap
There is a concept in negotiations called anchoring — that is whoever makes the first offer essentially drops an anchor on the table. Your stakeholder may initially balk when you lay out a customer-oriented roadmap, but you’ve subconsciously set the stage for where you will steer the conversation.
Action: Conceptually draft an ideal roadmap for your company. This should be backed with homework you’ve done to better understand the dynamics of your internal stakeholders and the needs of your customers.
Pro Tip: Closely related to tactic #4, focus on themes that solve customer problems versus tactical features.
Outcome: Over time, you begin to position yourself as a “customer thought leader” in the room and eventually throughout the company.
Consider this: A winning product = happy, paying customers. Happy, paying customers = a happy business. Our goal as the negotiator of the product is to get to a win for the customer which by extension is a win for the business.
So what are you waiting for? Go save your product! Your customers and your business are counting on you.
Author notes: Does this issue resonate with you? I’d love to hear different ways that you’ve negotiated a better product for your company. Leave a comment or shoot me a note at ryan@productmaven.co.
Want some additional recommended reading right away? Check out these awesome articles from Brent Tworetzky, Janna Bastow and ProdPad
