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.

Types of Innovators

The job of a product team is to solve problems for its users and the business. We might not always think of it in this term, but that problem solving is innovation. Some problems require higher levels of innovation than others, but always that should be a goal of our product teams. A Harvard Business Review article explores the roles we take on during the innovation process, “to identify where specific people are needed and who should work together to generate new breakthrough ideas.”

HBR identified four innovation styles: Generator, Conceptualizer, Optimizer, Implementer

The research found that generally, these innovation styles are not evenly distributed. The most people were found to be implementers, folks who take action to put solutions into work. The least amount of people were found to be generators, those who find new problems and ideate based on their own experiences.

This is problematic for two reasons. One, the product teams you are working on are likely lack a balance of innovation styles to be insufficiently cognitively diverse. To solve the most wicked problems that rise on your product, you’ll need support from all four of the innovation arenas. And two, the style you are most likely missing is generators. If we aren’t identifying the problems, are we best serving our users?

Bringing this framework to your product team can help the team understand where they might have gaps, and which innovation styles they might need to lean into.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

After they learn about the innovator types (have them read the article, or walk them through the above graphic), ask your team which innovation style they lean toward. Is the distribution the same as the general population? Which areas are missing?

Ask them to think about how to encourage an even distribution of styles on the team, as well as how to create more generators within their team and the organization. Remember that innovation styles are cognitive state, not fixed personalities. How best can you use identifying these styles to create more true innovation on your team? How can you use this to smooth the pain points in your problem solving processes?

AI in Product

Artificial Intelligence is a HOT topic right now. With headlines like “If You Aren’t Using AI, You’re Falling Behind” and “AI is changing jobs across industries” and “Forget about the AI apocalypse. The real dangers are already here” no average person can not be thinking about AI. But as product leaders, we bring a different lens. We need to be thinking through how the ubiquity of AI and machine learning can benefit our users, our processes, our products.

To get your team thinking about how AI might affect them - and generally change the world - try having a stand-up discussion dedicated to it. These YouTube videos can be good thought-starters:
- How Will AI Change the World - a 6 minute TED Ed video
- The Urgent Risks of Runaway AI - a 15 minute TED Talk by Gary Marcus, an AI researcher

Like so many technologies and innovations, there is no one right way to incorporate AI into your product or processes. It is on us as product leaders and within our product teams to learn about the technology and the options available and determine if this will be useful. However, it is also important to understand our team’s hesitancies or excitement about the possibilities. It is hard to maximize the effects of something that you are fearful of. The below prompts can help open up discussion.

And after the discussion, if your team wants to learn more, this free learning path from Google Cloud Skills Boost could be beneficial.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Before stand-up, ask your team to watch one of the videos above that provide an introduction to some AI concepts. At stand-up, focus on how the team feels about the rise of AI, and if they have any fears or concerns.

One way to do this would be to imagine the future a few years from now. Using a whiteboarding platform, they can place themselves along a spectrum of opinion on various parts of AI. Another way could be to just ask open ended questions about their concerns or what questions they have. Likely, you’ll have a wide range of responses, as well as a wide range of familiarity with AI and its concepts.

To add some humor, maybe show your team this meme.

Personal Prioritization

Product Managers are ace prioritizers when it comes to business requirements and feature requests. However, they, along with other product team members, can suffer when prioritizing their own work. Each day our schedule and our to-do lists are an exercise in prioritization. We can approach this work in a value/effort matrix or any other sort of prioritization framework, but things like scrum ceremonies and standing meetings have a way of skewing the results.

With a full calendar it can be difficult to see what modifications can be made, and even harder to follow-through on eliminating them. But, imagining a clean slate can be a way to think through prioritization. Use this stand-up exercise to spark a discussion (afterward, maybe think about beginning to default to no to protect your calendar).

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STAND UP EXERCISE

Invite your team to an imagination exercise. Picture waking up and all your responsibilities and obligations have vanished. What do you miss? What items do you immediately add back into your schedule / to do list / life?
After making a full list, contemplate the flip side of this question - what do you fight to keep off of your calendar?
Can you use this theoretical exercise to prioritize your calendar going forward? How do you add in more of or focus on the first set of items and deprioritize or cancel the second set?

Exploring Polarity and Strategic Tension

A topic we often dive into as a product team is competing initiatives, resources, or stakeholders. We attempt to remedy through prioritization frameworks, gaining further insights, and negotiation. However, some tension, some competition in these realms, is good. Tension keeps your rope taut, able to understand the push and pull of what you are tethered to, keeping you aware of your surroundings and its forces.

If we think about our goals or initiatives in the same way, we can explore the opposing forces pushing or pulling the organization or team in several ways at the same time. Product teams that address just one of the poles in a tension are apt to miss opportunities and fail to deal with threats. Looking for the tension between opposing forces broadens the search for strategic responses and increases the prospects of taking appropriate action.

A few weeks ago we explored polarity through contradictory users. The exercise below broadens our exploration into several different forms of polarity or tension, in terms of short term and long term initiative planning.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

John Cutler wrote a list of prompts for exploring tension as a part of the annual planning process. Distill the list into a handful you believe your team will find most valuable. Add them to a white board or virtual Miro and ask each team member to choose one fill-in-the-blank prompt. Though reticent at first, my team quickly began filling in multiple prompts. Discuss what the team came up with.
And remember, strategic tensions are dynamic - they can change as the strategy is executed or the initiative develops. Revisit these statements to edit or add as needed.