FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT LEADERSHIP: STAKEHOLDER COLLABORATION
Product Leadership: from stakeholder management to collaborative partnerships
Empowered product teams do not serve or manage internal stakeholders but rather collaborate with their internal partners to best create value for users/customers. To move away from delivering features and achieve empowerment, product teams need to:
1. Show product leadership
2. Transition from stakeholder management to collaborative partnerships
3. Move away from communication silos and share insights and learning
4. Continuously evangelize the product organization
5. Remember to keep the lights on
Having strong product leaders and empowered teams is necessary but not sufficient for success because great products are built in the context of their broader organizations, which requires great working relationships with the rest of the internal stakeholders who represent other key areas of the business.
Building and maintaining excellent working relationships becomes more important when an organization is used to dealing with the product team as a “serve the business” working model that chugs out features upon request. This is in contradiction to effective product team management which desires to shift to an empowered model that aims to create value for customers and create rather than serve intuitive internal demands.
This will require moving the working culture of the product team from a “subservient” one to a “collaborative” model, which can be a significant change to how a company functions every day
To make this transition, product teams and their organizations need to:
- Show product leadership
- Transition from stakeholder management to collaborative partnerships
- Move away from communication silos and share insights and learning
- Continuously evangelize the product organization
- Remember to keep the lights on
1. Show product leadership
Moving from a subservient feature-building product team to an empowered collaborative one requires trust between the product teams and the rest of the leaders in an organization.
Building this trust falls on the head of product who 1) needs to have competence and confidence in his/her vision and team, 2) is trusted by the CEO and other key executives, 3) will negotiate for power and influence others, and 4) is in the game for the long run, as change takes time.
It’s important to note that for any product leader to succeed in building trust, they must be empowered to the same level as their peers in the organization. If that’s not the case, then we can’t expect miracles from them to influence peers, for example, in the marketing department, that would help empower product teams to solve difficult problems.
A table-stakes responsibility of a great product leader is to establish direct relationships with the CEO/GM and other influential stakeholders including sales, marketing, customer support, finance, and legal, and help them realize that the product team is committed to providing solutions that work for the various aspects of the business.
In addition to building relationships and trust, product leaders need to :
- Build a product strategy — it’s improbable that subservient product teams have a strategy with focused business outcomes. To become a collaborative and empowered product organization, a product needs a focused strategy which will need to be communicated and shared with the senior leadership for alignment and decisions on the work to be done. It’s also important to involve key stakeholders during the strategy development phase so nothing surprises them later when the final strategy is presented for alignment
- Deliver business results — nothing like bringing in results on business outcomes will drive change. It’s also likely that the previous models were not delivering the expected results. Hitting targets and delivering results will require the product team to have a focused strategy and empowered and accountable product teams
- Personnel and team — no product strategy will bring in results without competent and passionate people and teams that are empowered to solve difficult problems. And product managers play a key role in the success of the product organization. Therefore product leaders need to take staffing seriously and recruit and onboard talent with intention and wisdom
2. Transition from stakeholder management to collaborative partnerships
Stakeholder management is a term that is often used in subservient product organizations that churn out features as output rather than business outcomes. The type of relationship in an empowered product team is more of a collaborative nature than a subservient one.
In feature-output-driven product teams or subservient ones, product teams are driven to serve “the business”, which refers to several internal stakeholders who have asymmetric access to decision rights and information, and with that power, they will need to be “managed” — or better to call it, “served”.
In essence, subservient product teams are internal agencies that deliver various stakeholders’, often whimsical, requests. And rather than having “product managers”, they have “engagement” or “relationship” managers who are mercenaries at heart and mind, rarely are stretched outside of their intellectual and aspirational comfort zones, and hence stagnate career-wise, and very little coaching and shared learning occurs.
The existence of subservient product teams in any organization is an indication of huge organizational and cultural problems
This situation is usually a nightmare for product managers as they can never make all the stakeholders happy, as each has their specific interpretation of the elephant in the dark room, while the product team does not have the resources to attend to all of their interpretations of the solution-to-be. And most often, the “business” decisions and requests don’t make logical sense.
Empowered teams are built to serve users/customers and deliver business outcomes for the company by building solutions that users/customer love — therefore rather than “serve” or “manage” “stakeholders”, these product teams “collaboarate” with their “partners” across the organiztion
On the other hand, empowered product teams have a fundamentally different relationship with their organization. Empowered teams are built to serve users/customers and deliver business outcomes for the company by building solutions that users/customers love. In these situations, stakeholders are partners that collaborate with the product team to come up with viable solutions and they don’t need to be “served” or “managed” but to be “collaborated” with.
3. Move away from communication silos and share insights and learning
Empowered teams are built on experimentation and rapid discovery of what solution will stick with users/customers — therefore, empowered product teams are generally riddled with user/customers, business and industry context, and technological insights.
Empowered product teams need to share their learning and insights with the larger organization for a variety of reasons including:
- Help create alignment and trust across the board
- Help other teams improve their productivity levels
- Help improve the dynamics of your interpretation of discovered insights and learning
- Help the organization understand failures
- Help create a culture of openness and generous sharing
- Helps celebrate wins, inspire teams, and create positivity
4. Evangelize: sell your product to your organization
A critical role of the product organization and leadership is to continuously “sell” the team and its output to the larger organization. By “sell”, we are referring to persuading partners to contribute to the health and growth of the product by:
- Showing them prototypes and demos, of what the output will be
- Elaborating for them the customer pain, you are solving for
- Sharing the vision and strategy, the next 5–10 years to be
- Sharing your insights and learning
- Showing credit and gratitude, for cooperation and collaboration
- Being well thought out and ready to answer questions
- Having an optimism bias and being enthusiastic and excited
- Motivating the immediate team members as agents of change and the larger organization
- Encouraging and organizing cross-functional events and gatherings for quality person-to-person interaction and conversations
5. Remember: Keep the lights on!
While the focus is to move from subservient to empowered and collaborative product teams, it needs to be reminded that there is always certain work that is nonnegotiable and needs to be continuously maintained such as fixing bugs, addressing compliance and legal issues, or incorporating new reporting and analytical needs. Otherwise referred to as keep-the-lights-on work.
While the product manager is usually the sole person responsible for understanding such tasks, collecting data, and maintaining the backlog since very little product discovery work is performed on these tasks, depending on the volume of KTLO work, it can help to have product operations teams that are solely focused on KTLO.
The source of most KTLO work will be business partners from the organization and if the product team doesn’t handle these tasks, then it will leave them in a bind and make relationships tense, leading to product disempowerment.
Therefore, if the product team is understaffed for KTLO work, then this needs to be immediately raised and addressed to build trust with partners. And if a product team finds itself serving continuous partner requests of new features shadowed under KTLO that do not fit on the product strategy, then it’s important to restrain from service and highlight the product strategy, priorities, and focus.
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