How to effectively work with stakeholders

As a product manager, you get to work with many people, teams, and organizations to make things happen. For all of those interactions to be effective, you need to be clear about who you work with and the best way to work with them. That goes beyond your customers, your users, and your product teams. It would help if you also thought about stakeholders - the other folks in your organization that impact, or are impacted by, your product team’s efforts. Here are some thoughts on effectively working with stakeholders (often referred to as stakeholder management).

How to communicate with internal stakeholders like a product manager. Product managers have to engage with internal stakeholders consistently. They can include several functions and roles across the company such as marketing, legal, sales, and finance. Your interactions with those stakeholders is just as important as your interactions with customers and users, so you have to master communication with those stakeholders. Ian Khor offered some suggestions to help you do just that.

(via @iankhornerstone)

Dear product stakeholder, please show me some love. Many product managers struggle with sustaining a solid platform in their roles and across the wider organization, even when they have a formal mandate for the product management job. There are often several reasons for this. Typically, one of the prime root causes is product managers not getting much love from stakeholders across the organization. Sigi Osagie explains how product managers can work with their stakeholders to feel some love, in a purely professional sense of course.

(via @MindtheProduct)

What is stakeholder management & how to manage stakeholders. Product managers want to lead collaborative and successful projects throughout the entire product life cycle. But the more people that get involved the harder it is to manage their expectations, interests, and opinions. Sara J. Nguyen describes how stakeholder management can help you develop your relationships with stakeholders and ensure that you have a satisfying communication and engagement plan with them.

(via @prodcollective)

Stuck in the middle: Mastering stakeholder management. Emily Tate describes how, as product people, we often find ourselves stuck in the middle of tough negotiations, and while making everyone happy isn’t our goal, mastering stakeholder management is key to building successful products. Emily describes how, as a former product manager, she had many stakeholders, but none were quite so great as Bob; Bob was the dream stakeholder who was always on her side, endorsing new innovations and bold solutions… until it all went wrong.

(via @MindtheProduct)

Stakeholder management for product managers. Imagine you are a product manager in a product area where you need to collaborate with marketing, category management, operations, customer support, finance, legal et cetera. How do you deal with the ‘Let’s Build…’ propositions from your marketing partner or properly manage expectations when technical challenges cause you to miss a commitment date? Gagan Mahajan describes the secret sauce that helps you build credible relations with stakeholders across your organization so that you can gracefully handle situations such as these.

(via @meeshotech)