Are We Going About Stakeholder Alignment the Hard Way?

I was at a recent Product Coffee meeting and the subject of stakeholder alignment came up. I immediately sensed heightened stress levels in everyone’s voice as the discussion progressed. I know stakeholder alignment has always been a challenge, but the intensity has clearly been ratcheted up as the complexities in product management continue to grow.

Stakeholder alignment is critical in any job, but it’s amplified exponentially for product managers because everyone’s a stakeholder in the products. It’s one of the most stressful challenges every product manager deals with. It begs the question, are we going about it the hard way?

No Choice But to be Everything to Everyone?

If you think about what product management teams are doing in an effort to get stakeholder alignment, it’s a version of “trying to be everything to everyone” except now we’re talking mostly about internal stakeholders versus markets and customers.

The funny thing is, product managers are the first ones aboard the “stop trying to be everything to everyone” train. But in this case, they don’t have any other choice if they’re going to get product plans funded.

Here’s the thing about internal stakeholders though. In some respects, they’re just like customers. They don’t always know what they want or what they need, but they definitely know what they need to accomplish, why it’s critical to their success and the obstacles standing in their way.

Here’s some food for thought.

What If…

What if product management stopped trying to align with each stakeholder and took a completely different approach to get stakeholder alignment?

Instead of each product manager trying to align to each stakeholder’s agenda, what if product management shifted gears and started aligning stakeholders to the same things they’re aligning their products to, your target markets and the business of the customers in those markets?

Here’s a glimpse into how that would happen and how it would help product management and all stakeholders get completely aligned to everyone’s benefit.

Aligning Stakeholders to the Market

STEP 1

Let’s say product management goes on a tear and decides to make it their mission to become the recognized and unequaled experts on your target markets and the business of the customers in those markets.

In other words, everyone in your organization including stakeholders, acknowledges and trusts that product management has done its homework through and through and possesses more well-rounded knowledge than everyone else on the dynamics in your target markets and how those dynamics are shaping the business priorities and challenges of your target customers from the c-suite all the way down to the users in the trenches.

In order for your product management team to acquire and maintain that level of expertise on a consistent basis, you may need to tweak the responsibilities of a few people. You don’t want every product manager doing this for his or her products.

You’ll want a few senior people doing it for the entire portfolio while product managers stay focused on user needs that support those higher level customer business priorities and obstacles.

STEP 2

With a full arsenal of market and customer knowledge in hand, product management routinely organizes meetings with stakeholders and shares their wealth of market and customer knowledge. This is where stakeholder alignment begins.

What product management is doing is aligning all stakeholders to a common view the market and customers, the same view that’s driving their products. The result is the stakeholder wheels immediately start turning on what they need to do to succeed accordingly.

Now marketing, sales, customer experience teams, engineering finance, etc. can start building their own prioritized to-do list based on the same view of the market as product management. In other words, you’ve established cross-organizational alignment to a common view of the market/customers and everyone’s priorities complement and support the things that are most valuable to the market.

Product management will build what’s needed to drive growth, adoption and customer retention. Marketing and sales will maximize revenue from existing products. Customer experience teams can measure the value customers get from your solutions. Finance can more predictably forecast revenue and profitability, etc.

The skids are greased for stakeholder alignment and it will happen more naturally than it would otherwise.

STEP 3

Assuming product management uses its collective market knowledge to craft portfolio/product strategies, roadmaps, plans, priorities, backlogs, etc., the strategic and operational value customers will receive from the proposed solutions can be easily quantified.

Close the deal with stakeholders by quantifying the resulting strategic and financial value those solutions return to your organization, and you’re as close as to complete stakeholder alignment as you’ll ever get.

The Bottom Line on Stakeholder Alignment

If every product manager is doing their best to align to every stakeholder, you’ve got a matrix that’s impossible to manage. Every product manager has no choice but to be everything to everyone. It’s not going to happen, EVER!

If product management as a whole (at the portfolio level) is aligned to its target market and customers and it can get all stakeholders aligned to a realistic, well-rounded view of the same, the end result is stakeholder alignment across your portfolio. It eliminates the need to do it for every product because execution at the product level is mapped directly to a customer-facing portfolio strategy with a clear ROI back to your organization.

Here’s the bigger benefit. When everyone is aligned to a common view of the market, execution priorities across your organization are synchronized accordingly and priorities won’t change (80/20 rule) unless there’s a sudden shift in the market that changes the business priorities of your target customers.

If product management is truly going to be the conscience of the organization and lead, there’s one skill it has to have bar none. Product management has to be more knowledgeable than all other disciplines on the market segments you serve and the business of the customers in those markets (from the top down).

Years ago, former Chrysler President Robert Lutz famously said, “you can make dust or you can eat dust.”

When product managers possesses a greater level of market and customer knowledge than all other disciplines, they’re going to make a lot more dust than they eat. If they’re not on a mission to do that, they may have to acquire a taste for dust!

If you want your product management team to learn how to acquire a greater level of market and customer knowledge than all other disciplines, contact us about a personalized product management workshop for your team. It’s the foundation of everything we’ve been teaching for 20+ years.