Stakeholder Management & The Art of Skating
Earlier this week, I moderated a great panel of seasoned product managers where we discussed “Ruthless Prioritization”. At the end, while chatting with one of the attendees, I was asked on how to best manage a lot of stakeholders — like 60 — and if I had any advice on how to wrangle such a large crowd. I gave some quick thoughts, but thought it an excellent idea worth expanding on.
Have something you’d like we to write about, let me know in the comments!
Choose Your Skates
Getting stakeholders to all participate means making sure everyone is equipped to play. Your skates keep you going in the game, but if you’re wearing the kind that don’t fit, you’ll quickly find yourself frustrated and slipping behind. Not all skates are created equal.
Find Your Style
As it turns out, people choose their skates like they consume their information — it speaks volumes to how we learn. Some are in it for the design and aesthetic (the visual learners). Others are all about the specifications and impact (the detail learners). Some like to be talked through the pros and cons of one kind of skate versus another (the audio learners).
Different people have different palettes for information. Sometimes, we try to short-circuit this process by designing information one way and hope that it will be useful to all. This rarely works as planned, unfortunately, and you’ll end up explaining that information over and over in different ways. Not one to recommend premature optimization, however, if you know you have different kinds of learners amongst your stakeholders, spend the time to prepare your message in a way that eliminates confusion.
Find Your Fit
Some skaters know right away if they have the right skate (the intuitive). Some skaters need to give them a try first (the interactive). Some just can’t make up their mind and have to come back later (the analytical).
Every once in a while, someone likes them all. Other times, some people won’t like any of them — aren’t you lucky.
Not only do people consume information in different ways, they also absorb it at different rates. For example, not all visual learners immediately “get” it, just because it’s a visual. Some people look at what’s on the page, others look beyond it. Often we need time to reconcile what we’re seeing with what we know and that’s not always readily on tap.
Most importantly, just because someone is intuitive some of the time doesn’t mean they’ll be the same all the time. Every bit of information has different dependencies and different people will draw on their distinct abilities to bring them relevance.
Design Your Rink
Stakeholders don’t just need to learn skates they also need a place to skate. It’s incredibly important to provide a rink, or forum, for everyone to participate on equal footing. Rinks are designed to get us going in a similar direction with the guidance to stay in our lane.
It is easy to take for granted the great wealth of data and information product managers keep and prioritize. The rink guides others back to the game.
Bumpers
On any given day, we bring stakeholders back to the table to provide feedback. As may be expected, not every has all the context every time we do this. Bumpers provide a light nudge back in the right direction. Given a mild bit of context and reminder of process, most stakeholders will quickly course-correct, keeping everyone moving in the same direction.
Rails
Rails provide assistance to anyone who is unsure of what to do or how to help. Rails are especially helpful in two specific circumstances: for newcomers and for complex environments.
For newcomers, rails give them the structure and guidance to have both context and knowledge to lend their advice and insights. Good rails make it possible to scale steeper curves, faster.
Walls
Walls are solid and unforgiving. They serve as a last resort and often are used with outliers and challenging personalities. Though they’re not nice to have, they are sometimes required.
Walls help us enforce boundaries of utility. By having a place where we won’t pass, we make clear what information is relevant and irrelevant to the process. There are a few ways to establish walls:
- Data — opinions are wonderful, informed ones are better
- Process — how we make things is just as important as what we make, use it
- Authority — when all else fails, sometimes you have to pull a card
Ideally, we can stay clear of walls, but when there’s not cooperation or outright resistance, don’t feel free to check someone into the wall to try and get things back on track ;)
Design Your Game
Rules are what makes every game fun and safe for everyone else. It also helps us know what to do when something good or bad happens.
Play
Process is critical for every organization. Ideally, you have just the right amount. The process list, like a rule list, tends to evolve over time but the best games have a few, simple ones to govern daily life.
Get to a process that’s agreeable to most and stick to it.
Score
In product, there are no winners or losers, except customers and the business. Great product people have strong convictions, loosely held. Every stakeholder interaction is about balancing the best ideas against the reality of executing them.
Focus on the real winners, not the individual stakeholders.
Disputes
Disagreements are going to happen, in fact, we should welcome them. When we’re not aligned, there’s room for a new insight we might have missed. Of course, how those insights are surfaced, and how we manage disagreements can make all the difference between success and dysfunction.
Settle disputes the old fashioned way, with data.
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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, he writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Connect with him on LinkedIn or say hi on Twitter.
