Follow-up: Managing challenging stakeholders

This is a follow-up from a few previous notes about influencing without authority because product managers have a unique challenge in that they own the product roadmap yet they do not manage any of the people who are directly responsible for executing on a company’s products – and as this organizational design continues to develop it leads product managers to need the ability to influence others to help them achieve their objectives without the direct authority to do so. 
 
A quick reminder of the previous episode, in the dangerous animals of product management (Read the original article here and my note about it here).  

• Works on Latest Fire or WoLF, doesn’t need to be an individual but a disruptive situation such as unchecked technical debt
• Really High-value New Opportunity or RHiNO, usually a stakeholder in Sales or Marketing, is often heard saying “if we just had this feature now, we’d be able to close this massive deal”
• Highest Paid Person’s Opinion or HiPPO or the senior leader accustomed to having the final, at the expense of data and input for customers 
• Zero Evidence but Really Arrogant or ZebRA, as it is, after all, really tempting to skip over the validation process when we’re dealing in our areas of expertise, isn’t it?

 
In order to effectively deal with those dangerous animals, product managers essentially must master the art of influencing without authority – and that requires a unique mix of hard and soft skills. And while each animal requires a different approach, dealing with them more often than not involves one or more of the following tactics:
 

• Exercise and practice empathy: the best starting point for most interactions with a dangerous animal is to understand their perspective. Finding out where they’re coming from will help you get to a place where you can better align their motivations with product goals​

• Embrace transparency: alignment is easier when everyone understands not just the what, but most importantly the why of the product management process. Going the extra mile to provide visibility into tradeoffs, decisions, customer insights, data, in other words providing context can compel the dangerous animals to come to the table with more informed ideas

• Empower stakeholders with technical know-how: not having enough can be more of a risk than having knowledge. Giving the animals enough technical insight — especially about the impact of technical debt — can help them understand why an idea may not work or be the right choice for the product

• Practice tiny acts of discovery: Whether it’s using A/B testing to try out new ideas, or research what competitors are up to, or even reducing tech debt, tiny acts of discovery are simple tricks that can go a long way in quickly supporting or challenging the assumptions made by the dangerous animals

• Train animals to think like a product manager: develop and use some simple frameworks for evaluating new ideas then invite the dangerous animals to join in the exercise. These processes can feel more like objective assessments, taking the emotion and ego out of product decisions. It also helps to demonstrate what it looks like to seek underlying customer needs. Ideally, dangerous animals will start trying to understand customer needs themselves

• Connecting proof with purpose: whatever arguments and evidence put forward in favor of or against an idea, always tie them back to your company’s mission. If it doesn’t fit with the business purpose then it probably doesn’t belong in the product

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​My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 
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Head of Product
thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader