How to Manage Stakeholders as a Product Manager

Talk to the right person

You want to deliver your message to the right person.

Your time is scarce and so is time for most of the top-management functions. Make sure you know who to address. And when you’ve found the right person, that’s when the next tip comes in.

Get in your boss’s head

As a Product Manager, you’re wondering all the time about what’s going on inside your customer’s head. What do they want? What do they need? You want to solve their problems.

When talking to top management, put these skills into practice.

Try this philosophy on your management’s thoughts and needs. What problem is your management facing, and how is your idea an answer to that problem?

Look at it from their perspective, and fit your idea into their set of solutions.

Once you get into their heads, you will understand what you need to do to build a strong relationship with them. You want the other person to like you and be on your team. To create a bigger chance, analyse their behaviour.

This is what Caldini describes as the ‘Mirror-and-match’ principle. Make sure they can relate to you and see themselves in you. You have to focus on your joint interests, instead of their position relative to yours.

Match product and business goals

Explain how your product will increase the chances of reaching the business goal of the top management.

To do this, you first need to know what goals the top management has set for the entire organisation. After making this clear, explain how your product helps getting there. Create individual goals for your product that eventually support the overall business goals and align with the strategy they wish to follow.

Fear of missing out

In the rushing society we live in today, some of us have developed a brand new fear: FOMO.

You may have heard about it as ‘the Fear Of Missing Out’. We usually speak about it in terms of the fear of missing out on parties or diners, but it’s more than that.

You can use Fear Of Missing Out to manage your top management by showing what their contestants do.

If they believe their contestants to be more innovative and heading into a new, promising direction, they don’t want to stay behind.

Don’t they always want to be ahead of their contestants, instead of behind them? Make sure you provide a solution to get them ahead.

Conduct an experiment

Try your idea on a small scale. Draw out the amount of time you would need to put in, and what resources you might need. Reduce this to a minimum.

If the need for resources isn’t that high, people are more likely to give your idea a try.

Also, experimenting gives you the chance to test and innovate your own idea. Are you solving their problem? It’s a win-win situation. Need to convince yourself or the stakeholders to execute this idea? You can use some of these reasons to justify conducting an experiment.

1. You learn a lot about your own ideas and how the implementation works.

2. Even if your initial idea fails, you can discover why it failed and how.

3. You’ll save a lot of money if it fails, because it’s only on a small scale

4. You can involve the customer by letting them test your product.

Use data to tell a story

Why do you think your ideas serve the customer best?

Analyzing your customer’s data gives you access to their customer’s journey. To help your management understand this journey as well, take them with you on your expedition.

The data will provide a small insight into their customer’s head. This insight will be necessary for top management to understand where your idea fits to optimize their customer’s journey and user experience.

Google Data Studio

With Google Data Studio, you can transform your data into informative dashboards and reports that will help you tell your customer’s story. You can import data from for example Google Sheets, Google analytics, Adwords or Youtube-channels.You can visualize this in graphs, bar charts, heatmaps, geographical maps, scorecards and more. This will give you a quick and understandable overview of the gathered data.

Session replay tools

You can also use session replay tools to show the data gathered from your customers. There are multiple session replay tools available for desktop and mobile devices. Let’s introduce some of the options.

For desktop

Hotjar

If you want to show how people use our website in terms of their clicks, taps and scrolling behaviour, Hotjar can be applicable to you. It provides heatmaps and recordings, that give you a visual presentation of the way people use our site. You can see which buttons get the most clicks, and which pages get the most attention.

Fullstory

This tool is similar to Hotjar and creates a database where it gathers data of how users are browsing your site

For mobile devices

Adobe Analytics

This tool can help you to easily build custom reports and histograms to present your data.

UXCam

UXCam generates actionable insights.

UXCam can surface problematic sessions, that includes crashes or rage taps.

It captures data for both iOS and Android apps. UXCam visualizes your data through heatmaps, session replays, usage statistics and more. Advanced machine learning highlights user frustration.

As you can see in the image below, one of the buttons doesn’t respond the way it should, so users get frustrated and start tapping it repeatedly. Other buttons and fields don’t receive as much attention.

Take your moment

And finally, speak about your idea with pride and confidence. If you are confident it will work, let it show in your words. Be open, reasonable and understandable. Make sure you’re an absolute expert on your idea, who can answer the questions the different stakeholders might ask.

Tip: We recently stumbled upon a comprehensive guide about the whole product design process and the e-book “How to create successful digital product” – we recommend reading it.

Related Articles:

• What is Product Management?

• Product Management Tools the Best Product Managers use

• Best Product Analytics Tools

• How to think about the Customer Journey as a Product Manager

• The Perfect Customer Journey Map

• Product Manager Courses

• How to get respect from your development team (as a Product Manager)

• Mastering Product Roadmaps