Identifying Stakeholders

A key part of product management is managing stakeholders, as most teams require participation, guidance, and approval from a wide range of people across the organization. But oftentimes, product managers treat all stakeholders equally in terms of focus or time expended. A key component to effective stakeholder management is identifying your various stakeholders and grouping them by need. Having this knowledge will help your product team communicate effectively with these groups, and therefore gain early alignment on goals and plans, as well as address any conflict or risk early on.

Often stakeholders can be grouped by their levels of power and interest. A simple two by two can map these out - resulting in four groups: Players, Context Setters, Subjects, and Crowd. (This matrix was popularized by the book Making Strategy: Mapping out Strategic Success.)

The needs of each of these groups are different.

Players
High Interest, High Power
- need to be managed closely
- need high-quality data/insights regularly
- get buy-in on big decisions early
- ask for feedback often

Context Setters
High Power, Low Interest
- need to be kept satisfied
- they can influence the future overall context
- raise awareness with them
- could convert them to players?

Subjects
High Interest, Low Power
- need to be kept informed, "read only" stakeholders
- make use of their interest through low-risk areas of involvement
- "goodwill ambassadors"

Crowd
Low Interest, Low Power
- not worth time to actively manage
- inform via general communications
- aim to move into Subjects

How you interact with these groups in form of the cadence, information provided, and size of audience will all vary. But it is important to keep these general needs in mind, as the more you can tailor communication to gain support or approval from various stakeholders, the more likely your initiatives are to succeed.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Have your team do a stakeholder analysis by first listing all the groups (or individuals) they know to be stakeholders for your product. Then work to sort these folks into the 2x2 matrix, paying attention to both the level of power and interest. After their needs are identified, the product manager and team can begin to create tailored communication plans, focusing on building and maintaining trust with each of the groups.

Negotiation Tactics

One of a product managers most used, but perhaps most underrated, skills is negotiation. Almost every conversation a product manager has can feel like a request that needs to be weighed and agreed upon in some fashion. While a product manager can (and should) say “no”, the way in which they get to the no, or verbalize the no, is all about negotiation. It is a key pillar of communication, and one that can affect speed, outcomes, and team morale.

Specific negotiations with a pessimistic developer, or an over-promising salesperson, or an impassioned stakeholder will be different. But there are core strategies that remain the same.

When we think about negotiations, we often think of them as positional - where each party stands in opposition and applies pressure in attempt to get the other to yield. This is most often seen in bargaining transactions, or when someone is talking about “holding a hard line.” However, the better approach is often principled negotiations, where all parties come together as a team to find the best outcome and maintain the relationship. The Department of Product wrote up an informative article that summarizes the findings of the Harvard Negotiation Project on principled negotiations well.

According to the study, there are 4 facets which make up principled negotiation:

1. People - Try to separate the people from the problem, by focusing on the real issue, not who brought it up. Then be sure to bring in empathy for the multiple perspectives involved, participation from those people, and resist the temptation to get emotional.

2. Interests - Understand the shared interests, which are common to all parties, and the divergent interests, where they disagree. Also keep in mind many interests can be traced back to security, wellbeing, sense of belonging, recognition, or control, and so try to address these root causes first.

3. Options - Generating options for an outcome should be separate from deciding, and no option is a bad one when you are just at the brainstorming phase. Then compare and contrast within your list.

4. Criteria - Attempt to use objective criteria wherever possible in your negotiation to move away from emotional influences. Search for criteria like fair market comparisons, professional standards, scientific judgement or raw data to analyze options.

A product manager even tackling one or two of these strategies in their daily interactions can rapidly move them toward more effective communication. Not every negotiation feels like intense conflict, it can simply be a question of priorities or slightly different goals. Negotiation isn’t inherently a good or bad thing, but getting to the best answer makes a difference for speed, morale, and outcomes. And, importantly, the best answer isn’t winning - it is a result that is good for all involved, takes the appropriate amount of time to get to, and preserves or even strengthens relationships.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Give a prompt to product managers to ask them about a negotiation conversation they had this week / sprint / cycle. Examples might include - an executive wanted a new feature added to an MVP; do we prioritize working through this technical debt or getting started on this new initiative; the designer wants more time to iterate and the engineers just want to get going; our lead candidate just got another offer for $10K over our budget; do I really need to attend this meeting or can I send another team member…

What went right? What went wrong? Using investigation of the four facets of principled negotiation, where could they have dug in deeper? Be sure to share yourself, as negotiation is not a once-and-done skill, but a learning path for all of us.

A following stand-up could come back to this topic and ask if anyone was able to use these techniques to find a desired or beneficial outcome.

BONUS:
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a famous game theory problem that shows that single event negotiation is very different from multiple event negotiation. On any given product team, you’ll need to negotiate often, so it is best to stay focused on the long term relationship. Have your team play though this interactive game “The Evolution of Trust” to learn and enact the theory.

Evangelizing UX

Even organizations that have had UX practitioners for some time may find themselves in the situation of needing to defend their practice or processes. While generally speaking, everyone agrees that “we must listen to the users”, the ferocity in which UX approaches this can be off-putting to other disciplines. Folks in Marketing for example might feel that they can achieve necessary results without input from UX.

“Evangelizing UX is a never-ending process and requires perseverance. Knowing what’s good for UX is good for your organization provides a great incentive for driving the UX message home every opportunity you get.”

— Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Editor of UXMatters

UX can be a constant act in persuasion of stakeholders. But luckily, persuasion is convincing someone through reason, and it can be easy to align UX with business goals. If you can prove to stakeholders, on their terms, that usability improvements will help them meet their revenue or conversion goals, those improvements have a high chance of being implemented.

So how you get the word out is important. One way is soliciting involvement of folks across the organization. Reviewing a wireframe and asking for feedback can be done by anyone in the organization, as can usability testing. Asking stakeholders to actively get into the mindset of the user through these activities can be a valuable exercise to reframe their needs and benefits. There are other hands-on ways to involve others and evangelize detailed in this video by the Interaction Design Foundation. The most important part is making user experience an accessible and understandable concept by the entire business, and then continually using UX principles and gains to move the needle on improving both the user-focused product and the bottom line.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask the team to read or skim “Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization” from UXMatters and/or watch the above video from the Interaction Design Foundation. Start a discussion with how can we continue to or ramp up our current efforts with evangelizing UX within the broader organization. What are some tangible ways we can advocate for our practice area or get our message out to a wider audience? How can we better distribute our findings? Who should we be specifically targeting with this message / who should we be talking to that we aren’t?