Stakeholders are a tough group to please for Product Managers & Product Owners. Stakeholders usually outrank us, outnumber us, and they all have different opinions and priorities. It feels like herding cats.

Here are four techniques for Product Owners to have more influence and better manage their unruly stakeholders.

#1 Get explicit agreement on decision authority

A common problem is that decision authority is unclear, and lots of stakeholders think they are the decision maker. This is a recipe for confusion, infighting, frustration and delay. To avoid this, gather your stakeholders and reach an agreement on who has decision authority in these key areas:

• Product strategy

• Budget, schedule and scope tradeoff decisions - including prioritization

If the Product Manager/Owner is NOT the authority on these, then clarify who is. As a PM/PO, even if you don’t own the decision, you at least need to know who does.

#2 Identify 3-5 key value drivers for your products

Another common problem is that various stakeholders have lots of different requests, and we don’t have a consistent way to assess their value or priority. As a result, priority decisions are made based on subjective opinions, or by whoever is shouting the loudest. To mitigate that, identify a small set of 3-5 key drivers of value for your product, and score each request/project/feature against those values. Here are some examples of value drivers:

• New customer acquisition

• User experience

• User data security

• Reliability

Now when a stakeholder requests a feature or work of any kind, score that request against these 4 value drivers. It can be a simple as assigning points for each one, using a 1 to 5 scale. If you want to get a little more sophisticated, you can set a weight for each value driver. These numbers can be used as the basis for a Business Value Matrix used to prioritize or sequence a backlog of work.

#3 Run tests to validate product ideas

Rather than relying on stakeholders’ intuition and assumptions to drive product decisions, test and validate their ideas with actual customers! The next time that highly opinionated stakeholder requests something, ask ‘How can we test that idea with real customers?’ Explain the value of this approach for risk reduction, and if necessary, remind your stakeholder about past features and product decisions that didn’t pan out.

A few way to validate product ideas:

• Surveys. You can poll customers at-large, or establish a small group of customers on an advisory board

• Interviews with focus groups

• Mock-ups or simple prototypes - share tangible ideas with customers and get their reactions

• A/B tests

#4 Get your stakeholders talking to each other

When your CIO or VP of Sales makes a request 1:1 to the Product Manager/Owner, it’s hard to push back. When that same stakeholder is among of diverse group of peers, and makes a request, all the stakeholders have an opportunity to challenge or support the idea. As the product owner, you benefit from the wisdom of the crowd. You can level the playing field among stakeholders using techniques like voting to give all stakeholders equal input on a decision. Here are some opportunities for stakeholders to meet as a group.

• Product strategy sessions

• Roadmap planning / quarterly planning

• Sprint reviews / product demos

• Product scoping sessions, using techniques like user story mapping or customer journey mapping

Learn more about managing stakeholders! Join Agility11 Founder Brad Swanson on Sept 19, 2024 for our webinar.