Stakeholder Alignment

"Great PMs hunt for misalignment and quickly push everyone back into alignment. They know that team dysfunction is often rooted in people simply having different information, motives, or priorities. They know that rooting these out is some of the highest-leverage work they can ever do."

"Great PMs build a tight leadership triad with their EM and DM. They know that their team operates best when the leaders of the team speak with one voice, and since most of the team reports to the eng. manager and the design manager, it’s essential that these three leaders work as an aligned unit."

"To effectively influence stakeholders, the first step is to understand how each person makes decisions––what they value (e.g. goals, incentives), who they consult, and what they’re afraid of. I usually start by setting up one-on-ones with key stakeholders (or people who know them), to understand their POV."

"Based on the intel I gathered about the partner team at YouTube, I realized it wouldn’t be enough to emphasize how strategic my project was to the company. The partner team had a long backlog of requests from other teams that I was competing against, and they needed more confidence in my project’s expected impact on a particular metric they cared about."

"Problem statements are like silver burritos. Everyone on your team has a unique version of the problem in their heads. Your job is to eradicate this misalignment early and often. Open up the wrapper and make sure everyone agrees on the burrito inside."

"Operating by consensus slows everything down, it wastes everyone’s time, and rarely leads to the best outcome. It CAN work, but it’s rarely optimal."

"When you find your team heading in the wrong direction, come back to the facts. Assume you’re wrong. What do you see that your team doesn’t see? More importantly, what does *your team* see that you don’t?"

"Find the decision-maker: Who makes the final call on what’s prioritized? Focus your efforts on that person. If that person says they will defer to someone else, focus on that other person."

"A healthier approach that I’d recommend is to simply communicate to leadership and associated teams that you plan to tackle a project in an ambiguous area, and ask them to let you know by a specific date if they disagree. If you don’t hear anything, just go for it, while also communicating your progress regularly. The key is that you don’t block on waiting for approval – it’s more of a heads up."

"Good relationships with remote engineers and designers require ensuring that there are methods for avoiding miscommunication. You do this by maintaining clarity. Your goal on a remote team is to create a culture where it’s OK to ask for clarification when something feels unclear."

"To avoid this, my advice is to (1) always have a strong “why this is a problem” argument in your PRDs/1-Pagers and (2) speak with the engineer, designer, etc. in person when kicking off a non-trivial project to explain the rationale behind the importance and address their concerns in real time."

"Buy-in is the result of showing your team why your idea achieves their goals. It sounds trite, but it’s true. In practice, however, it is difficult to do."

"If you co-create your idea with your team, your team will be infinitely more receptive to your suggestions. Co-creation means collaborating with others to identify the best solution or plan of action."

"On the other side, what are people best at? People stuff! Aligning opinionated stakeholders, unblocking blockers, pushing teams to work harder, creating amazing experiences, getting buy-in on big ideas, understanding and acting on nuance, etc."

"If there’s ever a question about competing priorities, we flag them and review them in our quarterly planning roundtable the last week of every planning cycle. Anyone is welcome to add an item to the agenda for this roundtable, the purpose of which is to make sure we’re aligned on the relative priority of investments."

"In the moment, I remind myself that the most important first reaction is to pause, think, and then ask clarifying questions instead of reacting defensively. I might say something like “That’s interesting and new to me! Let’s find the customer call recording and then watch it together; I want to hear what you think.”"

"The more work that your team has done up front to bring leadership into the story of your priorities and strategy prior to this decision point, the less work your team will have to do when new requests come in. This involves a lot of repetition of your priorities, your projects, and your strategy (in that order)."

"Initially, my pitch was around my team’s goals: increasing host retention and host engagement. But after a bit of back-and-forth, I adjusted my pitch to focus on what I knew the search team cared about most: increasing guest-side conversion. I told them this had a good shot at actually increasing conversion, and that we would run a specific A/B test to find out."

"You can charge your battery by doing things that build trust, and tap into your reserves when you need people to trust you. ... Why did Samwise Gamgee leave everything behind and risk his life to help Frodo? Because Frodo’s trust battery was off the charts."

"Instead, if you take the time to make sure the other person truly sees what you see, and understands why this is the correct (and only) path, they’ll follow you, and stick with you through difficult times. ... When you last ran into an obstacle trying to influence others, did you bring them on your thought journey and help them see what you see, or did you jump straight to the ask?"

"The credibility of other people/institutions will trickle down to you. ... A word of warning: The more you rely on authority, the more your authority fades. You start to become just a middle person, without your own voice or decision-making powers."

"A final strategy for increasing your influence is simply to be likable. It may sound trivial, but it turns out it’s one of the most powerful ways to build your influence. As Robert Cialdini (world expert on influence) teaches, 'The more you like someone, the more you’ll be persuaded by them.'"

"GACCS is a simple yet flexible framework for writing a marketing brief. It’s a common language to get buy-in and alignment on marketing work. You can also think of GACCS as the one-pager for marketing."

"It’s easy to over-index here and focus too much on people liking you and doing everything leaders suggest. You don’t need 100% of people to love you, and part of your job is pushing back on bad ideas."

"Figma Slides was a bottom-up initiative that came to life through a mixture of prototyping, camaraderie, and optimism bordering on delusion. Evangelizing the idea at hackathons, vision pitches, and product reviews bought our team a small amount of headcount to “explore” the space."

"Think of your product as a small flame. Your job? Grow it into an unstoppable wildfire inside your company. Do that by sharing progress early and often."

"Product velocity is about speed and direction. When teams get too focused on “moving fast” but don’t have alignment on what to work on, they end up working on competing priorities and pulling in different directions. In those cases, trying to move faster can actually slow you down."

"If I asked three co-founders to write down their startup’s target customer, I got three different answers. If I asked a team what differentiated their product from the competition, I got a 60-minute debate. Smart, motivated people who respect their colleagues can still struggle to get on the same page."

"Designers and engineers are most engaged when they are involved in goal setting and goal breakdown. Sometimes product managers hesitate to “waste people’s time” in sessions about goals, but I would argue it is the most valuable time to spend together."

"As a manager, your team is now your peer managers (e.g. EM, design manager, DS manager, etc). It’s essential that you work as one unit because your team will be looking to you each of you for a clear direction and confidence."

"Surprisingly, though not so surprisingly (since PMs are generally de facto leaders of their team), leadership ended up being the single most cited PM skill, highlighted by 85% of the companies (all but three)."

"The best PMs quickly become the de-facto leaders of their cross-functional teams, not because of any actual authority, but because they help everyone on the team do the best work of their lives."

"At Headspace back in 2016, we had established our product roadmap and success metrics and our mission and vision, but teams were still confused about why we were working on the projects we chose. Without that clarity, teams weren’t able to get several projects off the ground and had unproductive debates on what to build."

"First, try to work it out the person directly — If at all possible, talk to the person about this one-on-one first. I bet you they are feeling the same frustration."

"Unfortunately, I was terrible at selling the idea, and for five years, nothing happened. We tried hackathons, enlisting interns, and testing new products (Wishlist, I’m looking at you), but we never quite built up the momentum to get it going."

"Your teammates didn’t sign up to report to you. They are your peers, and they expect for their ideas to be heard and their input to be taken into account. The good news is that this will actually lead to better outcomes (and better teammates)."

"Think carefully about who you want on your next team. Who’s going to help you align, make decisions, and ship—and who’s going to derail everything?"

"Don’t go into important decision meetings not knowing how key stakeholders will feel. Meetings should be low-drama and full of non-surprises. To accomplish this, do the pre-work."

"An important habit of highly effective product managers is to be endlessly hunting for misalignment—and quickly pushing everyone back into alignment. For example, rooting out misalignment between designers and engineers, researchers and PMs, and executives and the team."

"I’m reminded of how much of your ability to influence others really boils down to two things: (1) how convincing your evidence is and (2) how much people trust you, your evidence, and others on your side."