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... 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?

1. How To Manage Misaligned Stakeholders
(Who Are Usually Misaligned)
Rich Mironov / Lean Product Meetup / 19 August 2021

2. We want to jump into prioritizing and algorithms but
1. Stakeholders are naturally misaligned,
lobby against each other
2. Requests (stories) come in different categories
with different metrics and rationale
3. Need overall allocation (strategy) before
sorting individual tickets
4. Expect stakeholders to forget, disagree,
fight “OR” choices
Opening Thoughts
@RichMironov

3. • Hard to rank-order unlike items
• One more bug versus next minor feature
• Deal-specific integration versus UX improvement
• Units of ROI are different!
• Instead, group similar requests
• Which three visible features go into v6.5?
• P0, P1, P2, P3…
• Deal-specific, single customer
• Validation/discovery/experiments
Prioritizing Within Buckets

4. unplanned,
deal-driven
Quality/fixes, scalability,
security, infrastructure,
architecture
Validation,
experiments
visible features,
UX, upsell, new
markets
Software Investment Portfolio
@RichMironov 4

5. Lens: most recent pre-sales issue
Metric: current quarter revenue
“This missing feature lost the deal”
“HugeCorp is threatening to churn
if we don’t promise…”
Sales Wants…
@RichMironov

6. Lens: headline features/benefits
Metric: top-of-funnel interest,
demographics
“Competitor Z supports Azure”
“That AI integration panel discussion
had 200 attendees. More like that?”
Marketing Wants…
@RichMironov
Now with Bitcoin
and Machine
Learning

7. Lens: reported issues
Metric: reduced tickets/outages
“New users struggle with sign-in”
“We’ve been flagging that data
corruption error for weeks”
“Customer wants a response by
COB tomorrow”
Support Wants…
@RichMironov

8. Lens: tech debt, infra, architecture
Metric: smoother development
“Transaction throughput is at max”
“If we refactor that as microservices…”
“RESTful API vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC ”
Engineering Wants…
@RichMironov

9. Lens: deep recency bias
Metric: close today’s large deal
“Mercedes is a top 5 customer”
“I’m told this one is easy”
“Everyone wants single sign-on”
Executives Want…
@RichMironov

10. • “Good Idea Train” delivers hundreds of ideas/day
• From customers, sales, support, execs, engineers, analysts…
• “If I follow process, then my request will be approved”
We’re Never Just One Feature Away
@RichMironov

11. Individual sales teams
hijack roadmap for
'specials'
Engineering, Support,
Product push for fixes,
ilities, architecture
Only Product &
Design lobby for
discovery
Sales/Mktg/Execs
over-index on
obvious visible
features
Stakeholders Push for Their Slice
@RichMironov 11

12. Involve stakeholders in XOR trade-offs within slices
• With Support: we have 45 story points/sprint
for bug fixes. Which 2-3 would you put first?
• With Engineering: we can put 5
developer-days against refactoring.
Highest ROI for velocity?
• With Customer Success: what are top
few product blockers to onboarding?
What To Do?
@RichMironov

13. Customer Validation Feature Definition/Design In Development
End User App
Team
Reporting Infra
Team
Partner APIs
Team
Customer Validation Feature Definition/Design In Development
End User App
Team
1. Faster notifications
2. UI templates v2
3. Auto-update
Reporting Infra
Team
1. Background queues
2. Data resynch
Partner APIs
Team
1. Usage monitoring
per partner
2. Tiered API access
Customer Validation Feature Definition/Design In Development
End User App
Team
1. ✔ Improved Sign-In
2. UI templates v3
3. Help-Me Chatbot
1. Faster notifications
2. UI templates v2
3. Auto-update
Reporting Infra
Team
1. ✔ Historical archives
2. Date spinners
1. Background queues
2. Data resynch
Partner APIs
Team
1. Scale-up to 120 req/sec
2. Turn off deprecated calls
1. Usage monitoring
per partner
2. Tiered API access
Product WIP (Work In Progress)
@RichMironov
Customer Validation Feature Definition/Design In Development
End User App
Team
1. New Job-To-Be-Done
2. Workflow snags
3. Adjacent market
1. ✔ Improved Sign-In
2. UI templates v3
3. Help-Me Chatbot
1. Faster notifications
2. UI templates v2
3. Auto-update
Reporting Infra
Team
1. ✔ P&L report redesigns
2. Next big report?
1. ✔ Historical archives
2. Date spinners
1. Background queues
2. Data resynch
Partner APIs
Team
1. ✔ 2020 pricing/volume
estimates
2. Code sample quality
1. Scale-up to 120 req/sec
2. Turn off deprecated calls
1. Usage monitoring
per partner
2. Tiered API access
✔ ready to move one column to the right

14. • Small but explicit “specials” budget
• Keep score (visible token)
• Sales VP shares scarcity,
shares outcome
With Enterprise Sales: Magic Bullet
@RichMironov

15. We are students of human behavior
1. Recognize (appreciate) each group’s bias
2. Get exec agreement for explicit allocation
3. Expect roadmap amnesia
4. Push EXCLUSIVE OR trade-offs within each
category/allocation
5. Find ways for stakeholders to help
prioritize by sharing pain of trade-offs
Takeaways
@RichMironov

16. Rich Mironov
Mironov Consulting
www.mironov.com
+1-650-315-7394
rich@mironov.com
@richmironov