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Communicating with Stakeholders

Derrick Fountain

A successful Product Manager must master interpersonal relationships.  Good Product Managers are able to adapt their communication style to each stakeholder group. Product Managers with cross-functional skillsets are better equipped for this task.

Editorial & Business Stakeholders

The most effective tool for initiating and building relationships with editorial stakeholders is the one-on-one stakeholder interview. In this meeting, the Product Manager seeks to understand the current problems and challenges that the editorial team faces on a daily basis and how they currently overcome them.

A kickoff meeting is another technique for getting cross-functional stakeholders aligned on the goals and objectives for the product. In the kickoff meeting, the Product Manager is able to quickly get decisions and direction on resources and dependencies for the product and capture those decisions in meeting minutes.

Discovery Workshops are usually held for large projects where there is a high degree of uncertainty around which problems or user needs should be addressed. A workshop is held to “discover” the problems and potential solutions to a problem. This group setting is also an effective forum to communicate the product vision, strategy, and known facts about the market and potential user to a captive audience. The problem-solution scenarios that are captured in the workshop are communicated through a playback presentation.

Following any workshop or kickoff meeting with stakeholders, a project’s communications should move out of email and into a centralized online collaboration tool such as Basecamp. Sending an invite to join a Basecamp project after a kickoff meeting is a good way to introduce stakeholders to the tool. The first notification they will receive will be your meeting minutes or playback from the meeting. Adding the core team to a Slack channel is another approach for communicating within the core project team.

In addition to the tools and processes for engaging with stakeholders, Product Managers must also leverage soft skills such as eliciting feedback from silent stakeholders, using their own words when communicating, and following through on promises and commitments. The best way to maintain trust and confidence is to reset expectations the moment you know that a deadline or deliverable will be missed. The reset should be done in a face-to-face conversation with the key stakeholder and should not happen too frequently.

Technology Stakeholders

One of the core functions of product management is to deliver clear and unambiguous requirements to the development team. Before initiating a new development project, the Product Manager must first start with “why” the team is building a particular product or feature and demonstrate the value of solving this problem for users. The value that this delivers to the company is also clearly communicated. Communicating the vision, strategy, and problems is a great way for Product Managers to lead and motivate the technical team to do their best work. Problems are communicated on behalf of users and internal stakeholders and are referred to as the “voice of the customer” in traditional product management.

5 Tips for Technical Stakeholder Communication

  • Bring “voice of the customer” insights into sprint meetings.

  • Always keep a handy supply of market facts.

  • Think big, start small when scoping new features.

  • Reinforce good behavior by recognizing and rewarding it when it happens.

  • Catch a developer doing something right, instead of constantly pointing out what they did wrong.

After the “why”, a Product Manager then jumps into defining and communicating the “what” and “how” of the product development process. Agile Scrum is a popular approach for managing the development process. In some organizations, especially those with outsourced development teams, projects are usually executed with a fixed scope. This poses several risks for the Product Manager in managing expectations with stakeholders around what exactly will be in the final deliverable. In order to effectively manage the scope of development, an approach known as “wa-gile” is adopted. This approach combines Waterfall and Agile methodologies into a single approach where the scope of features to be developed remained fixed, but the depth of functionality of each feature is flexible and prioritized on a sprint by sprint basis. This allows the Product Manager to effectively manage risk and minimize waste in the development process.

What questions should the Product Brief answer?

  • What features to call out in online ad campaigns that are mostly likely to resonate with users?

  • What messaging should we use in our on-air promos?

  • What’s the key differentiator we should focus on in a press release?

PR & Marketing Stakeholders

Communicating with Public Relations(PR) and Marketing teams starts with a clear value proposition that articulates why someone would use your product over existing solutions. This is usually captured in a product brief along with other facts about the market and user.

As part of the go-to-market plan for a product, the Product Manager prepares a product brief that serves as a tool for marketers. In addition to market and user insights, the brief outlines the key features and benefits of the product. This equips the marketing team with the necessary information to know which features to highlight in ad campaigns and also inform advertising copy and messaging based on the language and images that are most likely to resonate with the target audience.

The most important piece of information that marketers care about is the target launch date for the product. Setting and communicating changes in launch dates have a significant impact on marketing, and resetting expectations when dates change is a core part of maintaining a healthy relationship with marketing stakeholders. A benefit of working closely with marketing on defining the launch date is that it may coincide with a larger PR event that could increase the impact and reach of the launch. Sharing a product roadmap with themes and major release over time is another effective tool for communicating and managing expectations with marketing and PR stakeholders.

Further Reading