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From resistance to resonance

Keynote presented by Ganesh Shankar at

Product-Led Alliance summit

Dec 7th, 2023

Mastering internal stakeholder buy-in for product influence

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Story Time:

Debugging stakeholder misalignment

Us vs Them thinking

Planning in isolation

Churning on Roles & Responsibilities

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The 3 Pillars of stakeholder buy-in

Purpose

Priorities

People

Over the years I’ve debugged a lot of organisations and I’ve found that mastering stakeholder buy-in comes down to these three pillars:

People - who you need to bring together to solve a particular problem.
Purpose - why it makes sense for this group of people at this particular point in time to solve this problem.
Priorities - the tradeoffs that you are willing to make to achieve the purpose of the organisation.

Now, the intersection of these three pillars is where the magic happens, if you put in the groundwork to strengthen each pillar, then maintaining stakeholder buy-in becomes easy, and an organisation can move quickly to deliver value. However, if misaligned, you’ll get bogged down in on minor details and the organisation will churn.

Let’s go through these pillars in detail.

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Pillar 1: People

Navigate the organisation with a stakeholder map

Who are my critical stakeholders?

What are their priorities, concerns and values?

Who do they listen to?

It should be obvious that the first step in stakeholder management is figuring out who your real stakeholders are. But, this can sometimes be harder than it may seem!

In reality stakeholders come in all shapes and sizes, some are extremely involved in the day to day of your team, and some you only need to align with at critical moments and act more as gatekeepers.

Whenever I land in a new organisation I first do some detective work to figure out what my stakeholder map looks like. And a good way to do this is to move around the org and ask folks like your peers, leads, reports and the obvious partners themselves who they recommend connecting with on prioritisation decisions, or who influences strategy, roadmap and resourcing for a particular area.

What you are trying to at this stage is answer the following questions?

Who are my critical stakeholders?
What are their priorities, concerns and values?
and especially for senior stakeholders, who do *they* listen to?

[Connect back to story]

At this stage though, it’s important to note that I wasn’t trying to fix things yet, I was mainly trying to understand who ended up escalating, why, and where each team had missed communicating with the right people. Now, the next step once I’d identified stakeholders was to think about how to influence them and build trust.

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Reciprocity

Do, and ask for favours

Tip: Use behavioural science to build influence fast

Liking

Route through trusted people

Social Proof

Create the right rituals

Consistency

Act in accordance with stated values

Authority

Demonstrate authoritative buy-in

Scarcity

Highlight windows of opportunity

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini, 2021

So let’s talk about how to achieve that:

If you can confidently influence you stakeholders you’ll have more room to take risks and make decisions. And while this can feel a little squishy - behavioural science is your friend here.

One of my favourite books on this subject, aptly called Influence, covers the behavioural science of why humans are more agreeable in certain circumstances, and outlines 6 reliable techniques you can lean on.

Now we could talk about influence easily for an hour, but I want to quickly touch on the 6 techniques and how I recommend PMs use them with stakeholders.

Reciprocity - this one’s pretty simple, if someone does you a favour, you think fondly of them and feel obliged to repay that favour. And, even more interestingly, the same fondness can be built when you ask someone for a favour. So the next time you meet a new stakeholder, ask them for a favour, something small like an introduction to other folks you should be talking to. Now this both shows that you care, but at the same time you’re starting the cycle of reciprocity by having them lend you a tiny portion of their credibility.
Liking - as a species, we’re wired to trust people who we like, and to take that further, we’re wired to like people who are like us. So when building stakeholder relationships, don’t try to go alone. For example, if you’re presenting to an Engineering stakeholder, bring your engineers too or try to connect on any similarities you may have. When working with senior stakeholders, start by aligning with junior members of their organisation and you can influence them through the trust they have for people they know and like.
Social Proof - When in doubt, people are sheeple just do what other people around them are doing. So here’s why establishing frameworks around how you seek input, make decisions and escalate when things aren’t going to plan sets an example for others, and allow you to influence outcomes.
Scarcity - Ever bought something because you saw a limited time offer? Yep, me too. But the same logic works when influencing stakeholders where you can focus on a limited window to deliver a certain type of impact or land on a plan.
Authority - Humans are wired to listen to those who we believe to have authority. So, structuring certain forums to bring authoritative voices to bear in decision making helps align people faster than just arguing things out.
Consistency - People like to act consistently in accordance with their values. This is a very powerful one for managing senior stakeholders, when mapping out who they are, take extra care to understand their values and work style. For example if a senior lead says “Before we can make decisions I want to ensure we’ve considered the voice of the customer” well, that is an anchor for consistency right there. Next time you end up with a review with them, explicitly call them out by saying “We’ve ensured to include the voice of the customer here” and it will help you influence a positive outcome.

There’s so much more to the art of building influence quickly, but I’m going to park this here and move on to the next Pillar - I’m very happy to go more in depth in Q&A.

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Pillar 2: Purpose

Pull stakeholders together around a common purpose

Why are we in this together?

What outcomes are we driving towards?

Do have a shared vocabulary?

Ok, so now you’ve got your stakeholders mapped out, the next most important thing to do is align on a common purpose. Aligning stakeholders is essentially an exercise in taking what you see as your purpose, what your stakeholders see as their purpose, and combining into a common purpose.

Now this sounds simple in concept, but landing this takes time and work, and you’ll want to use influence techniques we just discussed to keep the conversation moving forward.

At this stage you’re trying to answer the existential questions of:

Why does it make sense for this group of people at this point in time, to solve this problem? Essentially, why are we in this together?
What outcomes are we driving towards?
Do we have a shared vocabulary?

The way you word your purpose is really important, so take the time to phrase and rephrase until you feel like you have a shared vocabulary that you and your stakeholders both use. When defining the outcomes you want to see, I recommend using a framework like OKRs where you have your purpose articulated as the Objectives themselves, and the KRs act as shared understanding of how you measure progress. Assign ownership of these OKRs thoughtfully to make your stakeholders accountable for driving their success.

This activity brings purpose from different concepts which live inside of our heads, and puts it down on paper in a place folks can keep referring back to at critical moments in the project - so let’s talk about how you use Purpose to maintain stakeholder buy-in, and why you may want adjust how you frame purpose depending on your audience.

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Tip: Focus with framing

“Think Fast, Talk Smart” podcast, Muriel Wilkins, Matt Abrahams

Purpose serves as a frame, it focuses stakeholders and maintains buy-in at critical moments.

Frame Strategically

when aligning up

Frame with Narrative

when aligning out and down

So, one of the pivotal moments in any project is the dreaded stakeholder review… You know, where senior stakeholders can accidentally, or intentionally crush you and your team, or where you need to nail alignment in a large group of people.

Now, here’s where you want to use the purpose you defined earlier as a frame to set context, maintain alignment and guide decision making. The concept of framing comes from Muriel Wilkins, and the excellent podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart.

So, here’s the essence of it.

Just like in an art gallery, a picture or painting can be given wildly different energy based on the frame it is in, and that's exactly how you want to to use purpose to focus your stakeholders.

There are a couple of techniques to use when communicating purpose that I recommend depending on where your stakeholders are in the organisation.

The first is when you want to align with those above you in the organisation - Here’s where you want to frame the purpose strategically. Senior leadership usually has a frame of reference that’s 2 - 5 years into the future, and they don’t typically have a lot of time to spend on individual projects and teams. So when needing to influence senior stakeholders, anchor to a higher order strategy that is important for the business, and show how driving impact in your area helps achieve these strategic goals.

The second technique is for influencing stakeholders around and below you in the organisation, and that is narrative storytelling. Here’s where typically saying “we must do this because the company wants us to” doesn’t tend to go as far, you need to inspire and build empathy.

So when going out and down, frame your purpose through a longer narrative about the future you are building towards, and use real-world user problems to build shared empathy.

With this group, you want to provide some high-level guidance of the problems you aim to solve and why, and where you expect teams to work together, while providing agency to flesh out a more detailed roadmap and proximate objectives the team can hit along the way.

[Connect back to story]

I should be candid that it did take some time to get here, but we defined and refined our common purpose over a year to start pulling disparate teams and organisations into alignment.

Ok, now let’s talk about my favourite part, how you actually get stuff done. So once you’ve got a handle on people and purpose, the next pillar to focus on is that of Priorities.

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Pillar 3: Priorities

Where are we getting stuck?

What’s the fastest way to create value?

How do we make good decisions?

Learn to balance the important and the urgent

Prioritisation is at the heart of great product management. I think of it as identifying the difference between things which are important, and things which are urgent, and then balancing the two.

When debugging organisations I’ve found that an inability to prioritise is one of the biggest symptoms of stakeholder misalignment. But, while it’s very tempting to dive right into solving this, I cannot state this enough, you NEED to do your pre work before trying to fix prioritisation problems. If you don’t have the People and Purpose mapped out, then you will always, always get bogged down on prioritisation because you likely have the wrong people in the room, with wildly different perspectives on why they are there, all tripping over each other trying to make decisions.

But if you’ve done the prework, developing a robust priority model is relatively straightforward. Here’s where you bring it all together into one place. You have your People mapped out so you know which stakeholders to include when making or changing priorities, you have your Purpose defined so you can frame prioritisation conversations and remind folks what you are working towards.

I recommend thinking through the following questions with your stakeholders:

Where are we getting stuck today?
What’s the fastest way to create value?
How do we make good decisions?

And then design a lightweight process to prioritise and re-prioritise.

There are many prioritisation frameworks out there, which work well in different circumstances, but for large projects I personally like outcome focused frameworks such as OKRs where you can break down Annual OKRs into Quarterly OKRs at different altitudes, while still giving agency to teams to solve smaller parts of the problem on their own.

[Connect back to story]

Now, of course the important part in in all of this is making good decisions.

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Tip: Get serious about decision quality

Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions

Carl Spetzler, Hannah Winter, Jennifer Meyer

Guide decision making with strong principles and practices.

What problem are we trying to solve?

What data is required to make this decision?

What are we optimising the decision for?

What options have we considered?

How important is it that we make the right decision?

So let’s dig into that.

The ultimate goal with stakeholder alignment is to have you and your stakeholders in sync on decision making, where you all feel that can make the best decisions possible. Now, let me be clear, making good decisions doesn’t always mean you make the right ones, but that you have a framework for ensuring that your decision making is guided by strong principles and practices.

Another book I’ll recommend is called Decision Quality. It goes into a lot of detail on how to think through different aspects of strategic decision making in both work and life but I’ll summarise at a high level that leading into any stakeholder conversation around prioritization you should aim to answer the following questions up front, or highlight that there’s a gap in information which would allow you to make a better decision.

What problem are we trying to solve?
What data is required to make this decision?
What are we optimizing the decision for?
What options have we considered?
How important is it that we make the right decision?

Establishing clear principles for decision making in prioritisation with stakeholders takes time, so I recommend you build this muscle out slowly, as you develop trust. That said, having this kind of clarity, on what to do, especially when something unexpected happens is the glue that keeps teams together rather than pulling apart.

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Build stakeholder buy-in

like you build a product

Check the pillars: People, Purpose and Priorities

Experiment, Retrospect and Iterate

Learn from failures and come back better

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Thank You!

Ganesh Shankar

linkedin.com/in/ganeshshankar