With good stakeholder management, you can take much of the stress out of your working day. And that is necessary, because as a product owner in an innovative project, you already have enough stress. Unfortunately, managing stakeholders is not covered enough in most product owner training courses. That's why we give you 6 tips.
1. Systematically map your stakeholders
To manage stakeholders, you first need to know them. The larger your organization, the more work it takes to identify stakeholders. Start by finding out if the project has ever been made into a RACI matrix or stakeholder circle? If so, grab it from time to time. If there is no such scheme, consider making it yourself. In any case, make sure you build good relationships with your CEO, the investors and, of course, with your tech team and designers.
An important skill here is not to invent alone what your stakeholders want, but also why they want it. The better you understand the motives of the people around you, the better you can predict where you will meet resistance and where you won't. Good informal contacts and personal relationships are very important here.
2. Give them your opinion, including a business case
But above all, start with yourself. What do you actually think? As a product owner, you want to provide profitable software for your client and you want to keep your tech team working meaningfully. But if you are too “service-oriented”, you will quickly get stuck between those two tasks. If you have a strong vision of the product yourself, stakeholders will increasingly ask you for your opinion, so you will gain more and more control. Of course, to claim your seat at the strategy table, you have to come up with a good story.
In the case of investors, this usually means: a detailed business case and a well-thought-out product plan. If you base your opinion on solid market knowledge from research with proven tools, you increase the chance that you will be seriously listened to.
3. Use data and design to get everyone on the same page
Start every conversation with the right data and, where possible, with visual support for your arguments. Words are interpreted differently by everyone. With a visual design, it's much easier to get everyone on the same page. So work with sketches and prototypes as much as possible and also validate them with users. This is a much faster way to test assumptions than developing working software. Where possible, substantiate your opinions with usage data and show what trends and developments are underway in your market.
4. Don't get swallowed up by the surgery
And then there's the surgery. The construction process itself. That has the tendency to completely swallow you up. There is always a discussion, an incident or a impediment that you can focus on.
As a PO, you simply cannot afford to be operational alone. So successful product owners work from the start of the project with clearly defined responsibilities and with a team that, within clear strategic frameworks, can make its own decisions. In addition, there should never be a situation where you, as a PO, dictate and the development team goes into “you ask, we run” mode. Exchanging vision and ideas with your engineers is essential in finding the best solution for each functional question. And engineers are great at asking the right questions to show you what you don't know about the market and the user yet. So use their insights and criticisms to your advantage.
5. Slow down your tech team a little bit from time to time
Your development team consists of gifted, driven professionals who want to do meaningful, challenging work. And who become restless after just half a day without such a challenge. They also have an opinion about everything and therefore want to hear a substantiated story about why you (not) make certain choices. And why you want them to wait for the results of research you've set out to determine what the next feature should be.
6. Say no more often
Every software project involves changes in scope and vision, with the inevitable discussions that follow. Shorten discussions by assessing all changes against your own product and market vision, with the main goal of protecting the investment. If you have collected sufficient data and strategic insights, you often have an answer ready quickly. And by properly substantiating your vision, you can reach consensus between stakeholders more quickly
Check out our white paper
Want to read more about our vision of the role of the PO? And do you want our 4 golden tips for delivering successful projects as a product owner and working on your own status in the organization? Then read our white paper: Why you don't want to become a product owner (and 4 things to do if you're already a PO and want to deliver successful innovations)
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