🗞️ Issue #51: Don't Manage Your Stakeholders

And strategies for not committing murder

👋 Hola friends! Thank you for opening my email! I appreciate it ❤️

I’m Kax and welcome to my newsletter where I write about enjoying a career in Product Management, becoming your favorite version of a Product Leader, building a Startup, and all the human mess in between.

In this issue, I’m sharing

1. The common dynamic between product teams and our stakeholders

2. Strategies for not committing murder

3. And 5 things that may help with stakeholder management

Now on to the stories!

1️⃣ The Product Team <> Stakeholder Dynamic: A Common story

All of my coaching clients, current and past, have struggled with their stakeholders. And me too! Do any of these sound familiar? 👇

1. “They treat us like a feature factory with their never-ending requests!”

2. “They never want to make changes in the way they work with us!”

3. “They’re always escalating our issues to upper management!”

And I’m not even sure if I’m quoting them or myself from when my stakeholders were giving me nightmares. 😂

As PMs, we’re also normally dealing with multiple stakeholders. And they will all need something from you and your team — often in the form of a feature request that needed to be built last year.

source

But when that request doesn’t fit in our roadmaps for one reason or another, then we have a problem. Or rather, they have a problem with us.

And we try to make things better by asking them:

• About the user problems they want to solve except their interpretation of the problem is the lack of the feature

• About the impact they want to achieve with the feature we’re meant to build except their impact is not at all aligned with ours

we ask them outright or we ask them to fill out a spreadsheet. 👎
(been there, done that. please don’t do this)

So we try a different approach like introducing a new process to help manage and filter these requests — some might comply (at first), while the others might just ignore this new process altogether.

And while it’s tempting to take out our candles and do a ritual under the full moon that will gift our stakeholders with a zit on their nose that will never disappear — we complain and give feedback to our leaders instead. Who will pretty much chalk it up to our lack of seniority to manage conflict or tell us:

“You’re senior enough, figure it out”.

So what else can a PM do? 🔪🩸

I may or may not be speaking from experience.
Any resemblance to real life human beings are completely coincidental.

---

2️⃣ Strategies for not committing murder 🔪

After 20 years working in tech companies, 13 years in Product, I’ve worked with different kinds of stakeholders. And some have definitely made my blood run cold with merely a “Hi!” on Slack. At least in the beginning. But over time things have improved.

So let me share with you some of the strategies that worked for me, the teams I’ve worked with, and some my clients, that you can also explore so that:

1. Nobody ends up getting murdered after every quarterly planning (or worse… reported to HR! )

2. Working together started to feel like a real partnership vs a fight that needed to be won.

👠 Walk in our stakeholders’ shoes

As Product People, empathy is an important skill to have so we might understand our users better. But this skill can be extended towards our stakeholders as well.

This is why the one of the best onboarding step for any Product person is to sit with CS and experience answering tickets ourselves. Or to sit with the sales team in meetings with business clients.

These exercises are meant to help understand what users are concerned about about. But at the same time it’s a great way to also understand the following:

1. The goals and incentives of our stakeholders (e.g. for CS the time to resolution or the volume of tickets, for Salesthe deals they close)

2. Their concerns and their constraints (e.g. deadlines, policies)

3. The language they speak (e.g. money talks)

When we start seeing what the world looks like through our stakeholders’ eyes, we can start seeing their requests not as annoying demands, but as something they perceive to be a solution for the problems they are having.

When we start understanding the language they speak, we can reframe our conversations with them accordingly.

On one hand, maybe we can help them identify the potential problem their request is supposed to solve. On the other hand, they can probably better help us understand the monetary impact of the work we do (or don’t do).

🎨 Co-Create and (Over) Communicate

At the peak of my bad relationship with my stakeholders, desperate to also stop getting bad feedback from my manager about this - I put everybody in the room together.

I’m ashamed to admit this, but I will anyway, my secret agenda for that session was to show my stakeholders that we were doing so many things already and to please get off our case. 🫠

But the outcome we got from this session was so much more:

• Getting everybody in the same room surfaced that a lot of our goals and results are intertwined with each other

• That a lot of the things that we’re building or prioritizing can already address their needs

• That a lot of their ideas are even better than ours and have higher potential in helping us achieve our goals

So this one off session became a quarterly one. I guess one can say that it became a process - but it felt more like an opportunity to “build” together and have real alignment. Because we were no longer just having a negotiation about what’s going into the roadmap; and instead we were discovering together what can bring value to both users and business.

And this gave us real stake in each other’s work. Which made sharing progress, plans, and results a lot more exciting vs just something in my to-do list I need to tick off. And sharing problems didn’t feel dreadful because my stakeholders became partners I can ask for help from.

Over the years, co-creation with my stakeholders has evolved as I moved up to leadership roles. One of the outcomes of this co-creation that I still hold dear to my heart, was an internal community meant to share best practices, industry trends, news, and heads up on Trust and Safety issues between people who worked in the domain.

Co-creation can take on many forms which can blend well with over-communication. Sharing ideas even if it’s still germinating in our brains. Getting their input on strategies or ways of working. And more! Getting buy in becomes so much easier when people have contributed to the work.

i’m not making it up. we really did have these co-working sessions. :D

Disclaimer: Context matters! So co-creation for you can look different from how co-creation looked for me.

If you’re wondering how co-creation can look like for you and your stakeholders, I’d love to share more details from my experience with you or even brainstorm ideas.
Let’s chat? :)

🛡️ Build relationships and Earn trust

A lot has been said about the importance of relationships when it comes to looking for jobs. Our network can help us find opportunities, even refer us for roles, prep for interviews etc.

I like to think it’s the same thing when it comes to working with our stakeholders (but not in the context of looking for jobs).

Healthy work relationships, especially the ones where there is trust, for me, are the real game changers.

• It helps reframe the way we look at our stakeholders and we can start seeing them as partners or even team members who just report to different people or sit in different parts of the building.

• Feedback becomes easier to give and even receive. We tend to become more candid with people we trust. And feedback hurts a lot less too or not at all.

• You get allies who can help you influence decisions, strategies, or even structural changes.

• And work becomes fun and the environment feels a whole lot safer.

The benefits are endless, and that’s just to name a few.

after work fun times and the dinner bill that got all of us into trouble 😂

But how can we even begin to earn our stakeholders trust?

Well, when we begin to be trustworthy. And according to Rachel Botsman, our trustworthiness is shaped by our behaviors. Behaviors that can include (but not limited to):

1. How we treat other people

2. How credible and reliable we are

3. How we consider other people’s perspectives

Something to think about: If you think about your relationship with the people you trust at work, how do you feel and react when they tell you No? And is that how you would your stakeholders to feel and react when you tell them No?

Don’t take things personally

In an ideal world, we are always aligned with all of our stakeholders. In reality, there will be probably one or two left who you will still have a difficult relationship with - regardless of how many strategies or frameworks you try.

That’s ok. Really.

We cannot control how other people choose to behave or react or collaborate.

But we can control how we want to behave or react or collaborate.

Yes I’m talking about how sometimes:

1. We end up feeling frustrated or even mad at this person for days on end

2. We end up questioning our abilities as PMs (even if it’s 1 person vs 10 other stakeholders with whom you collaborate well with)

3. We end up wanting to be right in conflict situations with them vs wanting to do the right thing

Because when we give in to these feelings - spending our energy on feelings that bring us down, behaving opposite of our values and integrity, and questioning our ability to do our job well… we end up losing more than just alignment.

And it becomes even harder to find other strategies to prevent murder.

***

Why am I writing this? Because a lot has been said in many discussions about all we need to as PMs is just say NO - and when we can’t, we’re not doing our job right. And then we get thrown so many frameworks and tools on how we can do better. But when things don’t turn out well, we end up going on a spiral about how we’re not good enough as PMs, and with our confidence taking a major hit.

But stakeholder management is dealing with people. And people are complex by nature.

Maybe some people can be more rational and throwing data at the problem can make it go away. But most people don’t operate this way (not to say that they’re not rational). We all have our biases and preferences that we carry with us and not all of those can be easily smoothed out with numbers.

So sometimes the best approach is to add a human-centric one.

Besides, as much as we think our stakeholders can be difficult. They probably think the same thing about us ;)

What about you? What strategies have worked for you to help improve your relationships with your stakeholders? I’d love to read about them in the comments!

***

If you’re struggling getting alignment with your stakeholders even though you’ve tried out every framework written in the book, I’d love to help you figure out a strategy that can work for you and your context. Let’s chat?

---

3️⃣ 5 Things That I Loved This Week

1. Rachel Botsman on How to build and maintain trust (She also has a substack:

   Rethink with Rachel
   )

2. Jason Knight
   on How to best share roadmaps with stakeholders

3. Not just on stakeholder management alone, but still loving this piece by

   nikki espartinez
   on the business lessons she’s learned growing up in a restaurant

4. Amy Mitchell
   on Driving success through persuasion

5. And if your less than ideal stakeholder relationship is burning you out, try out the Magical Audios program to beat burnout in 7 days (use the code: MAGIC15 for 15% OFF)

---

👩🏻‍💻 Hi I’m Kax! And I offer support through 1:1 coaching. I typically work with experienced Product Managers, aspiring Product Leaders, and Women in Tech to help them achieve their operational and career goals while still enjoying their work and without compromising their well-being.

Here are some topics that I usually work on with my clients:

1. Creating their personal operating system and designing a relevant strategy to successfully deliver impactful products and get the reward and recognition that they deserve

2. Strengthening their presence in their organization to influence stakeholder decisions and company strategies

3. Successfully transition from Individual Contributor to Product Leadership

4. Confidently navigate the challenges that come with being a new a Product Leader from designing organization, managing and coaching your team, and balancing your workload to avoid burnout

5. Identifying and pursuing their next best steps that are fully aligned with their ambitions, preferences, and values.

If you’re interested, you can learn more about working with me.

---

And If you reached the end of this issue, I’d love to read your thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions in the comments. 🫶

💙
Kax

Linkedin | Instagram