Staying in Touch With Your Stakeholders

Hello product people and welcome to the Product Bakery. As always I have the pleasure to be here today with my co-host Alex. Hey Alex. Hi Christian. How is life? Life is always beautiful when I see you. Amazing. And I see you have an empty apartment. It seems like you are for your own today without any interruptions. Yes, indeed. No docs, no notifications, no girlfriend, only me. No girlfriend still working longer than me. We're celebrating in the office. I don't know. Up to her. So you are free of responsibilities and you don't have to report to your stakeholder. In this case you're my stakeholder, right? Yeah, that's true. As long as your girlfriend is not texting you. So Christian, reporting to you. Yeah, thank you. That's how it works. But I was just wondering because the whole topic of stakeholder management is right now something that I'm confronted with and I wanted to pick your brain today because I don't know how you feel but I know many people are struggling with communicating, getting updates from people, sharing updates, not knowing what other people are doing and having a bad life. I wouldn't necessarily say that I have a bad life. So that's how I'm feeling. But I think definitely since we're all working in cross-functional teams, companies are splitting responsibilities like more and more into smaller pieces and independent teams. That makes communication much harder, especially on different levels where you're acting on because I think stakeholders are super spread across multiple different teams where they have to work with and where they have to still keep an overview of what's going on. And at the same time, product managers, product designers, developers also need to manage a lot of different stakeholders. And even beyond that, align with every other product team in the company. It's not always easy, right? Yeah, absolutely. But on the other hand, I'm also sometimes, I don't know, I don't want to say shocked but you know, if you are a coach, you're looking at the things from the outside. And if I'm hearing, for example, in a conversation with a product manager, yeah, but the business development department, it's their responsibility to give us an update. They haven't done it. So now we have to do it and we have much more work. So just one example out of many, but if you're hearing those things, it's sometimes a little bit weird because obviously there is a lack of communication. And obviously if things don't go into the direction as we want them to be, it causes friction and it makes us emotional. And it's definitely challenging because we all have to do extra work that we not necessarily need to do. But what is the solution for that? I think talking is definitely something that's not the easiest for everyone. I think that's where a lot of people struggle. What did you just say to me? At the same time, you have a lot of people who unfortunately, or let's not say a lot of people, but unfortunately there are a lot of different agendas also in the companies. And so maybe not everyone is always pushing in the same direction and feeling like it's shared success. And I think this is a cultural thing. So I think if the shared success and the shared responsibility, like the feeling is missing in a company, well, then you really need to work in the culture. I think everything else can probably be improved. I think here the product manager becomes more important than ever because at the moment you start realizing that communication gets tough, I think it's even more important as a product manager to step up and take the extra mile. Because at the end of today, product is always responsible. Product is always that department that will get asked questions that has to report that is, to be frank, on the line. And as a product person, it's so important to manage the human interactions and give people context. Because as you said, not necessarily everyone is on the same page, but let's assume you are my stakeholder and you are requesting something to me and I can't build it because company priorities are different. My backlog looks different. And right now there is no way that we're going to prioritize your request higher. Just simply saying no, it doesn't help. It doesn't help me and it doesn't help you because you are pissed. You will get back to me in one week or maybe in two days, or you're going to escalate it to my boss. So I believe the very first step is to tell people no and tell people why. And without giving people context, and even if it takes a minute or two longer to write a longer Slack message or to jump on a call with a person, it's worth it. Because on the long run, you will spend much more time, discussions, emails on missing clarity and trying to fix things afterwards, which will become much harder. Yeah. There's a mix of also the importance of empathy. And I think we talked about this. Working in product most of the time is simply working with people. And as product manager, you're in between, right? Because you need to push back or give direction to the team. At the same time, you are managing the stakeholders and you might promise something to stakeholders that then the team's not happy with, or it goes like in all different directions, right? But I think context is crucial because context, it's also the best way to lead people. And also stakeholder awareness, because there are different types of stakeholder. And it took me a long time until I started realizing that there is a difference between stakeholders. Because there are people who have a lot of interest in what you're doing, but not necessarily a lot of things to say, not much of an impact. While there are also people who have a very high impact, but no interest, or people who have high impact and high interest, which could be, for example, your CPO or your CEO. And based on the different types of stakeholders you have, it's also important to think about the communication style. Because you don't need to involve, for example, someone from customer support on every product decision you're going to make. While your CPO eventually, or your sales VP or sales manager is much more interested in those decisions. So I think being aware with whom you are dealing with is the first step to also make sure that you push up or polish up your communication to those people. Yeah. You also need to understand, and that's my favorite thing to say, you need to understand people's goals and also their backgrounds. Like where are they coming from? Because if you say you have these three types of stakeholders, why is there someone who's not interested, but has high impact? What is he actually interested in? Because those are the things that you need to lead with. Because considering that he has a lot of impact, you also need to win him over. You need to partner up with the people that have impact, right? Those are your best allies that you can have. I mean, not trying to play it on anyone, but someone who's like super interested, but has no impact, maybe it's wasted time. Yeah. And you have also sometimes stakeholders who are challenging you as fuck on every decision you're making, and you might be pissed about it. But even here, I used to be very emotional and pissed as well back then. But honestly, and I think we all have that at some point, but looking now back at the time, I'm super thankful for the fact that I got challenged so much. And as you mentioned, even here, it's worth to not ignore those people or to try to avoid them. It's more important to sit down with them and have this conversation and face the enemy in quotes and try to bond and try to understand because we are all humans and we have to deal with each other on a daily basis. And especially on work, you see your working colleagues more than your partner. Yeah. Therefore, it's important to maintain a good relationship. I mean, we don't see each other that much, but I think that's also okay. But we're also not like working together. Yeah. Because you don't want to work with me anymore. Who's the coach in this group? Yeah. Who doesn't want to join me as a design coach? You could work for my company. We need a lot of product people. Yeah. Good point. If you need a coach, let me know, Alex. But yeah, I have private direct access to my coach. It's true. Yeah. But other than that, I think the whole part of stakeholder management is something that, especially in fast growing environments, is something that changes on a regular basis and keeping up with it isn't easy. But I was just wondering, when you mentor and coach your design people or your product people, what's the number one tip you share to make sure they stay ahead of things? I always say, understand where people are coming from. Understand your goals. I already said it. I think it's the most important thing in an organization. You need to in an organization. You need to know that because that helps you phrasing the communication the right way. Then you obviously need to be proactive around the communication because waiting for people to approach you is probably not get you very far and probably gets you in a position where you're too late to the party and things are already decided upon and you might be frustrated of, oh, why are we doing it like this? So you need to seek the conversation proactively. And if you do those two things and we assume that everyone's like a good professional and a smart person so that you can then actually bring in your knowledge, then it should be complete, right? Yeah. And we have also many listeners who are currently in a position where they want to climb up the ladder and want to make the next step or even want to have a seat at the table and want to join bigger strategic decisions as a senior or as a leader. And one of the most important things is that you are able to understand where people are coming from. Because the higher you get, the more you deal on an emotional basis, the more it's about agreement and alignment. And that's unfortunately the hardest part, but also the most important one. Yeah. And I think it's never about the title or the seat at the table. You want stakeholders to trust you and to approach you proactively if they have a question. They need to see you as a positive contribution, helping them reach their goals, going back again to looking at where they're coming from and what their goals are and what they want to achieve. Because if you have that trust, you are talking at the same level. They involve you. Exactly. It's then again becoming proactive. You will get the information earlier and you take the conversation from there. And you will get rewarded, as you said. Yeah. And it's about, I would say it's also to some extent about the human capital, that you build in a company. Nobody can give it to you. And I think especially, this is also something that I noticed once I started working as a manager and started changing roles. It's not that you automatically have the trust, especially when I was working in consulting, where you switch teams very often. You need to build a trust. Your title alone doesn't give you the trust. Stakeholders would still go behind your back independently of who you are and what you do. So you need to build the trust. You need to communicate. You need to constantly also ask them the questions. You need to help them reach their goals so that they start trusting you, involving you earlier. And then you have a good relationship with your stakeholders. And then you can also discuss and fight and push back. And go behind their backs. You should never go behind anyone's back. But that's the foundation, right? It's relationships. Managing a stakeholder is actually maintaining a relationship. Yeah. And even though it is our day-to-day business as product people, I still believe sometimes we're not spending enough focus on it. So I hope we can remind how important it is to maintain your relationship. And sometimes it's also important, in case the relationship is struggling, to be the bigger man or the bigger woman, and step up and be proactive. Because that's something that I expect from a product person. In case you're struggling with someone, even though they have treated you eventually wrong or went behind your back, I believe the best and most important thing you can do is making a step towards them and being proactive. But before we end this conversation, there's one thing I'm curious to discuss with you, which is the time that you spend communicating, right? Because I think, and especially if we look at COVID and a lot of people working remotely, you spend a lot of time in meetings. Some of them may be not super useful, but if you strip them, you also lose the communication. If you strip bigger meetings with multiple stakeholders, it's also trickier because you need to align everyone separately and might seem like you're going behind someone's backs. So what's a good way to manage that? Yeah, let me give you the perfect world example. It's very important to have the right people at the right time, in the right place and share the right information. But how do you achieve that? And it's also something that I'm discussing recently a lot with product people. The question is, there are so many meetings and we talked in one of our episodes to Christian Ideoti about it, right? If you spend most of your time in meetings, you might be a mediocre project manager, but you're not doing product work. So it is important to identify which meetings are really important and in which meetings you really have to be. Because if there's a meeting where you're just not saying anything, and honestly, how often does that happen? You should ask yourself, what am I losing if I'm not going there, including the connection and relationship? Sometimes it's just better to stay out and write the emails or write the documents or the documentation that is needed for your stakeholders, instead of joining a meeting where you are not contributing at all, and where you can get the information by just reading the meeting notes or just having a five minute coffee break with someone. Yeah. Interestingly enough, I had a conversation around this last week with our head of product, where I was talking pretty much about like also the importance of having the ops function. And we talked about research ops. I think we talked about product ops, design ops. So sometimes these roles can help you facilitate a lot of these conversations and free up some time for you to actually work. But at the same time, it's time taken away from you building relationships, right? So I think you just need to find the right balance, or at least that's the conclusion that I'm making up in my mind now, because I wouldn't necessarily want to always just get the information in a nicely consolidated version, because the human element is far too important in it. Yeah. Certain phases and certain times need certain actions. So in phases where you are pretty much involved into very important projects that are going on, it's important that you sit down with the people and talk to them. And you have also phases where it's sometimes less stressful in quotes. We all know it's always stressful. And then you have to find the balance and ask yourself if you can take a step back and spend more time on preparing the next upcoming bigger phase where more communication is needed and asking yourself what you can prepare now to make communication easier once you are in a stressful phase again. I know it sounds very high level, but everyone has to find their own balance. Talking about balance, work-life balance is very important, Alex. We both had a long day. Let's celebrate the evening. Let's do that. And to all our listeners, we wish you a great day, a great start whenever you're going to listen to the episode. And in case you liked it, feel free to visit us on product-bakery.com and also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. We are always happy to expand our social media reach and give you even more real-time updates over there. More important than that though, if you like it, share it with friends. Friends and family. All right. So, Alex, take care. Bye-bye.