How to align stakeholders as a product manager?

Aligning stakeholders as a product manager can be a challenging task. The two major levers are documentation (leveraging powerful templates to get tasks done) and frequent communication loops to facilitate knowledge transfer. First of all, it’s critical to identify and document who the stakeholders are and their level of control over your project. By documenting what you are doing, the timelines for doing it, the choices and trade offs being made, you can ensure everyone is aware of what is happening, the why and the when. By backing this up with routine touchpoints, you can ensure that knowledge reaches people at the right time. In order to facilitate decision making it's useful to be aware of frameworks like Jeff Bezos’ Type 1 / Type 2 decisions , and how to facilitate key stakeholders reaching decisions using the D.E.C.I.D.E. template .

What are some helpful tips for stakeholder management as a product manager?

In order to excel at stakeholder management as a product manager it’s critical to invest time in understanding your your stakeholder’s role and responsibilities, their connection to the project, their needs and their communication preferences. By understanding how your work affects their job, and by involving them early on in a conversation around their interests and concerns, plus their communication and touchpoint preferences, you should be able to set a cadence and template for communication which works for both parties.

How do you manage different stakeholders in the product lifecycle?

In order to effectively manage different stakeholders at different stages in the product lifecycle it’s key to map stakeholder interests, concerns and needs. As products mature, different people become involved as their interests or roles begin to overlap with the project. It’s important to see stakeholder identification and management as an iterative process at multiple stages of the product, rather than a process that is followed only at the beginning of developing a product. To facilitate this you can ensure the wider organization is up to date with developments, and you can routinely dust off the stakeholder list and ask the question as to whether it is still correct, and whether anyone else should be added.

How to deal with difficult stakeholders as a product manager?

Dealing with difficult stakeholders is a tough part of any job, but it’s a particularly key skill for product managers, given the cross functional and powerful nature of their role. Product managers should develop a mix of hard and soft skills in order to excel in their job. By focusing on the soft skills you should have in your toolkit (empathy, communication, creativity) and exploring options associated with those skills, it should be possible to solve many difficult interactions. Ask yourself: What is worrying this stakeholder? What reasons or concerns do they have which might be making it hard to work with them? How can we solve those together? Working through this thought process and setting up a one-to-one conversation where you can ask them these questions directly will demonstrate to the stakeholder that you are considering their point of view, and listening to their needs, thereby building more trust.

How do you create trust across organizations to get things done without formal authority?

Creating trust across organizations to get things done without formal authority can only be done by influence, which will allow you to get things done without formal line management responsibility or control. Influence is made up of trust (this person won’t mess things up / will listen to me / can be trusted to act reasonably) and respect (this person wouldn’t be asking unless it was necessary / that’s a good idea). It’s key to work on your interpersonal relationships cultivating good listening, empathy and communication skills, and your strategic skills (why, and why now) to build that influence.

How to Develop a Winning Stakeholder Engagement Plan

No product team works in a vacuum. One of a product manager’s core responsibilities is acting as the connective tissue between the product team and the rest of the business, and communication is a critical skill to enable this. Establishing great relationships with your stakeholders is essential for your own success and whatever you’re working on.

This article discusses how to identify your stakeholders, prioritize the relationships you need to build, and plan a series of touchpoints (a stakeholder engagement plan) to support them going forward. We’ll assume that the content for those touchpoints - your strategy, roadmap, backlog, PRDs and other materials - is already in hand.

Whether you are in a new role or looking to up your game, reviewing how you engage with your stakeholders, and getting proficient at creating effective stakeholder engagement plans can strengthen your relationships with them, make you more effective as a product manager, and save you time as well.

How do you define who is a stakeholder?

A stakeholder for a product team is someone who is affected by the outcomes of the work the team is doing. That means they have one or more of the following needs:

Are reliant on product capabilities to do their job
Want to influence the direction of the product team
Need to understand what is being delivered to manage risks and opportunities

In many companies the list of people who fit into this category can be very long and wide ranging. Whilst there are many stakeholders who are common across lots of types of organization, there can also be some unique ones depending on the industry or structure of where you work. An important point is that engineers and designers are not stakeholders, anyone who is day to day part of your product team is just that, part of the team.

Developing a Stakeholder Engagement Plan

You can develop a highly effective stakeholder engagement plan by walking through three steps:

Identify your stakeholders
Map the power and interest of stakeholders
Craft your engagement plan for different stakeholder segments

*Three steps to developing a winning stakeholder engagement plan*

I’ll run through each of these steps in detail now.

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How to Develop a Winning Stakeholder Engagement Plan

How do you define who is a stakeholder?

Developing a Stakeholder Engagement Plan

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