How to work effectively with stakeholders

Almost every product has a group of people who don’t build or use the product but impact, or impacted by the product. We usually refer to these folks as stakeholders and they often have more influence on the success of your product than you might expect. This week, we’re sharing some tips and advice on how you can manage your relationship with stakeholders without making it feel like you’re managing the stakeholders themselves.

Meanwhile, in product news, Google added tabs to Docs, Driver auto generates docs that could use tabs, Syncly organizes your customer feedback, and Jira now lets you name issues what you really call them.

Relationships matter: The art of stakeholder management. A typical product team has numerous stakeholders and dependencies to worry about. In addition, the success of your product often hinges on effectively understanding and addressing the needs and concerns of those various stakeholders. Kasey Fu shares reasons why stakeholder management is important for product managers, and how to become better at doing it.

Keeping the peace: How to manage all your product stakeholders. One of the most fun, and most challenging, elements in product management is working with a range of interdisciplinary stakeholders. You have to communicate with multiple stakeholders on any given day, so you need to regularly articulate thoughts to various types of stakeholders. It doesn’t help that every stakeholder has a unique way of thinking, and as such, contributes something unique to the product strategy. Ademola Ajijola reviews the various types of stakeholders and explains how to successfully work with those different types.

Navigating stakeholder dynamics in product management. Managing stakeholder relationships is one of the most critical and nuanced aspects of the role of product manager. Whether you’re a seasoned product leader or still sharpening your skills, mastering stakeholder dynamics requires an understanding of influence, expectation management, and alignment across teams and departments. Jeremy Horn describes some key stakeholder dynamics and shares some practical tips for navigating those dynamics.

Deep-Dive – Mastering stakeholder management for product leaders. As a product manager or leader, your ability to manage stakeholder relationships is as critical as your strategy and execution skills. In fact, those relationships have a real chance to make or break a project whether it’s a new product launch, product strategy planning process, or any other project your product team is working on. Mike Belsito explains how to turn challenging interactions into productive dialogues and build stronger, more successful products through enhanced stakeholder management.

Strategies for Keeping Your Stakeholders Educated When Building Internal Products. When you're building internal products as a Product Manager -- there are all sorts of internal stakeholders to not just keep informed, but also educated. Just as important as it is to keep your customers educated on your products when building for external customers -- the same is true for internal stakeholders when you're building internal products. In this video, Product Collective Co-Founder, Mike Belsito, goes over strategies on how to do this best -- zooming in on insights from a keynote talk that was given by Vanathy Lakshmi, a product leader who's been responsible for building multiple internal products.

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This week on Rocketship.fm

Leveling Up: How Product Collective’s Pendo acquisition amplifies the product community. In this revealing episode of Rocketship.FM, host Mike Belsito pulls back the curtain on a significant milestone: Product Collective's acquisition by Pendo. Mike shares the origin story of Product Collective, from its humble beginnings as a passion project to its growth into a cornerstone of the product community. He candidly discusses the challenges of running a bootstrapped company and the exciting possibilities that come with joining forces with a larger entity like Pendo.

Product Management News: Week of October 14, 2024

Tabs aren’t just for spreadsheets anymore. New document tabs in Google Docs provide a better way to organize your documents. You can now use tabs to draft and build content in a way that makes it possible for you to find what you’re looking for quickly and stay on task. Plus, readers can navigate through your document with ease and focus on sections that matter most to them.

This is the kind of document that could use tabs. The technical documentation for chips in the semiconductor industry is often thousands of pages long. Keeping those documents updated with every revision is a massive lift, as is generating the manuals and tutorials for engineers who then implement those chips in their own products. Driver, a new startup that recently came out of stealth uses AI to cut this entire process down to only a few hours, while also giving businesses the opportunity to generate user-specific documentation.

What to do when drowning in customer feedback. Do you suffer from too much customer feedback? A purpose built AI tool promises to help customer-facing teams understand urgent issues by analyzing customer interactions —emails, chats, and others. Syncly pulls all your customer communication data across various channels then uses AI to categorize data, and surface trending topics and sentiments to give you full customer visibility. This is one way to make “too much” customer feedback a good problem to have.

Who knew there was such an issue with “Issues?” At Team ‘24 in Las Vegas,?Atlassian unveiled changes to Jira that make it a shared place for?”every team”?to align on goals and priorities, track and collaborate on work, and get the insights they need to build something together. One of the changes that seems to be garnering the most attention is the ability for teams to actually call work items something other than issues. Now you can officially label your items in Jira “tickets”!

Resources and news curated by Kent J McDonald