Stakeholder Alignment 101: How to Build Relationships Grounded in Collaboration, Transparency, and Trust
Stakeholder alignment is a critical skill for product managers. It involves identifying and engaging with all stakeholders who are affected by a product and working to build strong relationships with them. The benefits of effective stakeholder alignment include better collaboration, better alignment of priorities, and reduced risk of product launch failure. Read on to learn how establishing these relationships will increase trust and transparency with leadership and across your organization. We’ll also give you some tools and tactics you can implement right away, such as a sample stakeholder interview script and tech to facilitate stakeholder collaboration.
What Is a Stakeholder?
A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in or is affected by a product and can influence product decisions. In other words, each stakeholder represents some core part of the business. According to Marty Cagan from Silicon Valley Product Group, the list of stakeholders typically includes the executive team (CEO/founder and leaders of marketing, sales, customer success/support, and technology) and sometimes finance, legal, and other representatives from your go-to-market team.
What differentiates true stakeholders from other parties involved in a launch is that they can directly impact product development decisions. But that doesn’t mean they are the only internal relationships that need to be nurtured and maintained. Subject matter experts, product peers from other business segments, and respected individual contributors from other non-go-to-market teams warrant a similar, lighter touch, and can help to round out a product manager’s holistic view of a problem or opportunity.
Regular interactions between product development teams and stakeholders help to build trust and foster collaboration, and are essential to driving a product launch and your business forward.
Building Healthy Stakeholder Relationships
As a product manager, it’s crucial that the roadmap for the product or feature you’re launching creates alignment and sets proper expectations across your organization. Otherwise, stakeholders and the rest of the business will struggle to buy into the product vision, be unclear on goals, and ultimately lose trust in you and other teams involved in a launch.
When it comes to building healthy stakeholder relationships, you must first establish a Balanced Team. A Balanced Team is a cross-functional team made up of one product designer, one product manager, and anywhere from four to six software engineers (in some cases, eight engineers may be appropriate). The Balanced Team represents multiple critical perspectives, makes for shorter feedback loops and quicker decisions, ensures critical information doesn’t live in silos, and ultimately results in more efficient output. It’s also important to note that representatives from the Balanced Team should be involved in upfront, early strategic conversations with stakeholders, not just in later phases/sessions in a launch.
Next, you must align with your key stakeholders through stakeholder interviews and intentionally set your product launch team culture. Empathy, focus, efficiency and speed are all core values to maintain healthy stakeholder relationships and team dynamics. At Crafted, the phrase “strong opinions, loosely held” rings especially true. In other words, have data that supports your ideas or claims, but balance that with “a sympathetic grasp of the other person’s viewpoint” (Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People). Remember, this is not a battle of “us vs. them;” it’s a game we’re all trying to win. Decisions should be made from a well-rounded lens and it’s important to consider the needs and perspectives of your customers, your stakeholders, and the business as a whole.
In addition to being an active listener and considering multiple perspectives, it’s equally as important to “show your work” and be able to justify your decisions to get stakeholder buy-in. This occurs not only at the point of formulating your strategy and designing your roadmap but also throughout the course of a product launch. As product managers, we must “visualize our thinking so that stakeholders can give us feedback, share their experience, and co-create with us. We explore potential paths to our desired outcome together” (Teresa Torres, Product Talk). Conflict and disagreement are natural parts of stakeholder alignment, but effective product managers can use them to drive alignment and desired outcomes that will create the most value for the business. At Crafted, we practice Alignment vs. Consensus. Consensus means choosing the option that no one objects to, whereas with alignment, you debate, decide, and move forward. Even if you don’t necessarily agree, you understand why a decision is the best path forward and commit to it.
Next, it’s important to bring stakeholders along on the journey and keep them informed of your progress, work and blockers. Collaboration, transparency and trust are foundational elements of a healthy stakeholder relationship, and it all starts with good communication. Here are some general communication rules of thumb:
Communicate often (5x-10x more than you think you should). If you’re surprised at the number or kinds of questions you’re getting from stakeholders and other key Balanced Team representatives, jump on a Zoom call to get everyone aligned.
Communicate everywhere. Establish a meeting cadence with your stakeholders so you have dedicated time on a recurring basis to review key metrics and progress toward intended outcomes. But communication doesn’t stop there. Communicate in all the mediums including email, Slack, text, presentations/decks, all-company meetings, etc.
Tailor your communications (to the right audience, agenda, level of detail, amount of data presented, etc.)
Finally, invest in the tools that work for your team (see below) and if you are able, leverage stakeholders in prototype testing to get them excited about the product. And lastly, don’t only report on the blockers. Share and celebrate wins (no matter how small) so stakeholders notice your momentum and begin to trust that you are focused on constantly shipping valuable software.
Tools and Tactics for Effective Stakeholder Alignment
If you’re wondering how to incrementally improve your stakeholder alignment skills, we’ve outlined some tools and tactics below that you can start implementing today.
Sample Stakeholder Interview Script
How would you describe Project <X>?
What do you consider the biggest problems that Project <X> should solve?
Describe the goals for Project <X>?
What do you think is the number one metric to measure with this project that will determine if it is having an impact?
How would you measure success for Project <X>? (adjust time thresholds)
This quarter
This year
And beyond
What do you consider to be the biggest risks for Project <X>?
Force them to name 3
How do you think about prioritizing value and work for this project vs. others that the company has on its plate?
Are there any concepts or ideas that you feel Project <X> should explicitly avoid?
Any “sacred cows” that can’t be touched or deprecated?
Who do you feel are the other key stakeholders in this effort?
Anything else?
Tools to Collaborate with Stakeholders/Showcase Your Work
Miro - Online whiteboard
Figma - Wireframing and prototyping
Usertesting.com - Usability and testing
Crafted’s Reading List
Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan
Conclusion
Not only is stakeholder alignment a trademark skill of a seasoned product manager, but it’s also key to successful outcomes in highly variable and dynamic business environments. And a strong product manager enables the Balanced Team to operate efficiently by managing healthy stakeholder relationships. Establishing a foundation of trust and transparency helps product designers collaborate with stakeholders during design reviews and get comfortable with their feedback. It also helps software engineers get involved in early strategic conversations and break down and explain technical concepts to stakeholders. At the end of the day, healthy relationships across Balanced Teams and stakeholders increases trust throughout the whole organization, so your business can consistently ship high-value products fast.
At Crafted, we not only help teams ship high-value products fast, but we also teach best practices such as stakeholder alignment. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you build a healthy culture grounded in collaboration, transparency, and trust at your organization, reach out to us!
