414: Stakeholder management for product leaders – with Bruce McCarthy

How product managers can align stakeholders on product projects

Today we are talking about the need for product leaders to manage stakeholders and the associated challenges this creates. Aligning the perspectives of stakeholders on a product project is desirable as well as difficult.

Helping us with this difficult task is Bruce McCarthy. Previously, Bruce joined us for a three-part series on creating and using product roadmaps. He is the co-author of the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty. He is currently working on a new book project, co-authoring Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders. He is also the co-founder of Product Culture—one of his customers said about Bruce, “Coach, trusted advisor, organizational therapist—like me, you’ll probably hire Bruce because of his experience in product management or his skills as an Agile coach.” What a great quote.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[7:13] How did you move from focusing on roadmaps to focusing on stakeholder management?

When we wrote Product Roadmaps Relaunched, we knew just producing a roadmap is not the goal for product management teams. The goal is alignment of the team. As part of a workshop on roadmaps, I was briefly covering tips for gaining alignment, and someone told me, “I really enjoyed the workshop on roadmaps, but we need a workshop on alignment. This is the stuff nobody teaches. This is the stuff that allows you to take any framework, any bunch of data, any existing team, and glue it together.”

I came to the realization this person was right. It’s the hidden skill of being able to influence without having authority that is the difference between a product manager who would seem on paper to tick all the boxes and one who’s really going to be successful.

If you’re a product manager, you cannot issue orders, so you have to influence people. You can’t say, “This is where we’re going,” so you have to convince people where you should be going.

[10:49] What are the challenges that leaders face in getting other senior leadership in the organization aligned around feature prioritization?

Making good decisions is not the challenge; the challenge is getting people aligned with those decisions so you’re not constantly second-guessing or shifting priorities. If there’s a lot of disagreement on which features come first, that reveals there is not good alignment on goals—not the what but the why. Everyone has their point of view, and it’s up to you as the product manager to articulate not the ordered list of features but your vision for the future of the product, why it’s so great for the customer and the company, and how you will measure success with dollars and cents for the company. Given those assumptions, the priority list becomes much easier to agree on. You can still argue a little bit, but now you’re debating the best solution to the problem because you’ve agreed on the problem.

[17:51] What can product leaders do to create stakeholder alignment?

It’s easy to think you agree because you’re using the same words when you don’t actually agree, or to think you’re not agreeing when you’re using different words to mean the same thing. It’s helpful to think about stakeholders as a type of customer. For decades, product managers have been told they need to understand the customer, and they’ve been taught a lot of skills in customer discovery, but they forget all about that when they’re talking to people inside the company. That’s a mistake.

We segment customers. We can also segment stakeholders. In the company, we have different departments, functions, and levels of authority. I’ve developed the TIPS Framework to classify stakeholders into four categories: