The Secret to Successful Product Management: Effective Stakeholder Communication
As a product manager, I’ve often been asked what makes or breaks a product’s success. While context plays a significant role, one crucial factor that can lead to failure is poor communication. With diverse stakeholders to engage with, managing expectations and prioritizing effectively becomes vital.
I recall a challenging experience early in my career as a product manager. I tried to please everyone by doing a little bit of everything, but ultimately ended up pleasing no one. The situation became unsustainable, and I realized that change was necessary to avoid looking for a new job. That’s when I discovered the power of stakeholder mapping.
What is Stakeholder Mapping?
Stakeholder mapping is a simple yet effective method for understanding your stakeholders’ landscape, including their level of power, interests, and attitude toward your product or initiative. You can create a high-level map that encompasses the entire product spectrum or focus on current initiatives. The approach you choose depends on your specific context.
A comprehensive stakeholder map provides an overview of your stakeholders and identifies areas where relationship-building may be needed. However, it’s essential to prioritize and focus on the most pressing issues.
Why is Stakeholder Mapping Important?
People and collaboration are crucial to product creation, but the dynamics can be complex. Not all stakeholders are the same, and their interests, influence, and attitudes vary significantly. For instance, in ecommerce, I had to accelerate partner growth to increase offers in our shop. We enabled partners to self-board, but this introduced complexity. A stakeholder map helped me understand the dynamics at play and decide on the next steps.
A Modern Stakeholder Mapping Template
In 1991, Aubrey L. Mendelow developed stakeholder mapping as a tool to help teams determine how to interact with various stakeholder categories. Despite being over three decades old, this template remains relevant today. Here’s a modern stakeholder mapping template:
- Powerful stakeholders: Have the ability to halt your initiative or influence someone who could do so.
- Interested stakeholders: Have a vested interest in your product or initiative for financial reasons or because it directly impacts their work.
The template consists of four quadrants:
- Keep informed: Powerful internal stakeholders who aren’t particularly interested in your project but should be kept up to date on progress and results.
- Keep satisfied: Stakeholders who are both powerful and interested in your product. Collaboration with them is essential.
- Ignore: Individuals who lack power and interest in your product. Identifying them helps you determine who not to focus on.
- Keep involved: Stakeholders who may lack power but are highly interested in your initiative and can help drive progress.
Visualizing Attitude
To visualize each internal stakeholder’s attitude, I use color coding:
- Supportive: Will support you
- Skeptical: May oppose you
- Neutral: Need to be convinced
Real-World Example
Returning to my initial story, I felt overwhelmed by poor stakeholder management. To overcome this, I decided to map the stakeholders with the help of other product managers. We focused on quarterly goals and mapped the related stakeholders, reflecting on their attitudes and adjusting accordingly. The result was a clear understanding of who needed attention and how to prioritize our efforts.
Best Practices
Here are some best practices to get the most out of your stakeholder mapping efforts:
- Keep it alive: Review your stakeholder map at least every month to ensure it remains relevant.
- Avoid group thinking: Invite different people to create a mapping alone and then share their results to identify conflicts and facilitate discussions.
- Maximize different perspectives: Take action aimed at developing relationships. A stakeholder matrix without action is useless.
Key Takeaways
- Don’t lump all stakeholders together, as this will create more confusion than you can handle.
- Stakeholder mapping isn’t a solution in itself; it’s a means to an end.
- The goal is to identify potential problems so you can act quickly and get results.
- Focus on resolving relationship issues because this enables you to create value faster.
By following these principles, you’ll be well on your way to effective stakeholder communication and successful product management.