How to Manage Misaligned Stakeholders

Topic: “How to Manage Misaligned Stakeholders” and fireside chat
Where: Dan Olsen’s Lean Product meetup (online)
When: Thursday, 19 August

We had an extended product therapy session with lots of good questions…

Prioritization is hard, and we HOPE that a clear corporate strategy plus well-considered OKRs will get our internal stakeholders to agree on what’s most important: unambiguous #1 and #2 and #3 priorities. That our spreadsheets and analysis will sell everyone on our plan.
But that rarely happens: Sales wants us to put 100% of our development effort against shiny new features (except when every big deal includes a commitment for some tiny off-off item); Support/Customer Success want 100% against bug fixes and workflow improvements and productivity tools; Engineering lobbies for better architecture and scalability and more refactoring; Marketing wants us to document more use cases in more industries so that we can widen the funnel. We may wait for each department to “see the light” and give up its specific asks in favor of the greater good, but that can be a very long wait.

How do we understand this behavior, appreciate their effort (rather than just being frustrated), and find strategic tools that let us build out a single plan for our products and teams?

How To Manage Misaligned Stakeholders (Who Are Usually Misaligned) from Rich Mironov