Stakeholder engagement - Eadaoin Doherty
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Stakeholders are our best frenemies! Some great tips to help you manage the minefield
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Stakeholder engagement - Eadaoin Doherty
- 1. 5 tips for Stakeholder Engagement Eadaoin Doherty
- 2. Tip 1: Put yourself in their shoes
- 3. Tip 2: Create empathy for your user
- 4. Tip 3: Acknowledge some stakeholders are a little prickly
- 5. Tip 4: Keep everyone in the loop
- 6. Tip 5: Spot patterns in how your stakeholders communicate
- 7. You don’t have to figure all this out by yourself
- 8. Summary of my top tips Tip 1: Put yourself in their shoes ● What do they want to know and what do they need to know Tip 2: Create empathy with your user ● Move them from being viewed as ‘someone else’, to ‘someone we really feel for’ Tip 3: Acknowledge that some stakeholders can be a little prickly ● Get ahead of the game and spend time with them Tip 4: Keep everyone in the loop ● People HATE surprises at work Tip 5: Spot patterns in how your stakeholders communicate and replicate them ● Make your message really resonate
- 9. Which tips are your going to put into practice? ● Make your emails shorter and more concise for senior stakeholders ● Share quotes or recordings from your user research ● Have that conversation with a prickly stakeholder before the workshop ● Run a showcase or start sending weekly updates ● Grab a coffee with a colleague to get the inside scoop on how to best work with a particular stakeholder
- 10. Level 1, 673 Bourke St, Melbourne VIC 3000 www.cogent.co THANKS FOR YOUR TIME
Editor's Notes
- Today I’m going to talk about stakeholder engagement. A stakeholder is anyone that has an influence on the development of your product including the leadership team, the sales team, subject matter experts, developers, designers or product managers from other teams and people from outside your company. The key to getting the results you want, is to figure out how to best engage each individual. Here are my top 5 tips
- TIP NUMBER 1: Put yourself in their shoes There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to engaging stakeholders, but every approach starts with empathy. You need to understand what each stakeholder wants to know and what they need to know about your product. Being empathetic to the person’s role within the company, and their personality is a good starting point. Ask yourself; Are they in a senior leadership role or are they a peer? Are they a fine details person or a strategic thinker? How much time do they have to think about your product and the decisions you are making? We do this naturally with our friends and family. When we buy a cool new gadget, let’s say new earbuds, we know we have friends who want to hear about all the different brands we considered, how we compared them, where we bought them and how much they cost. We also have friends who just want to know that we got new earbuds and we love them. They are happy that the outcome is positive, they don’t need to hear any more detail than that. This is the way you need to think about your stakeholders at work - what to they want and need to know. A senior leader doesn’t need the same level of detail as a peer on your team. An email to a CEO should never be more than 3 lines long - think of all emails they receive every day. If your is short and to the point, they will appreciate it..
- Product users are the ones who give the meaning to your product. Without them, there is no need for your product, however they are also the group that are not there to advocate for themselves during discussions with your stakeholders. So it’s up to you to represent them accurately, to enable stakeholders to become empathetic to their needs. The user needs to change from ‘someone else’ to ‘someone you really feel for’ There are a range of ways you can do this; Use direct interview quotes when speaking about them If you record the interview you could play back audio clips or even video clips so stakeholders can hear the feedback first hand In some cases, you might even invite a stakeholder to join in a research interview
- I want you to picture in your mind one of your more difficult stakeholders. I know you’d had the experience - it might be someone from an old job or it might be you worked with today. Either way, we’ve all experienced it. So what can you do? Well basically, you have to embrace this challenge. You can’t run away from these people, you actually have to spend more time with them. It goes back to tip number 1; put yourself in their shoes, you need to figure out what they need from you, to become a supporter, or at least a less vocal adversary. If you know a person is likely to be difficult in a workshop, or when presenting a decision, get ahead of the game and talk to them first. Make sure they feel heard before the meeting, understand their key concerns and what they think the mitigations should be. Then in the meeting, acknowledge those concerns and talk about the mitigation strategies. Having this discussion ahead of time will give you more time to prepare, and allow you to seek input from your team if needed.
- Remember, at work people hate surprises – so keep all your stakeholders in the loop throughout product development. You might have the user journey map on a physical or digital wall that is available for everyone to see. You may have a public kanban. You might choose to run regular showcases that are open for all stakeholders to attend. You may choose to send out regular updates by email or slack, or you may need to use a selection of these approaches to meet the needs of all stakeholders. Which takes me nicely on to….
- If your stakeholders have a particular way they like to communicate, use it! Look at how they speak to an audience and present information, and use those techniques when working with them, while staying within your own style parameters of course. For example, I once worked with a CEO who loved to use military analogies when communicating with the company. I had to give a presentation to him about the different directions my product strategy could take, and why I was recommending a particular strategy. I didn’t want to use the military analogy as that wasn’t very me, but I knew if I took that kind of approach I would get a better response. So I built my presentation around the game of chess. Each chess piece represented a different potential product strategy. The CEO loved the presentation! He could really identify with it, and I got the feedback and response I needed to move forward with my preferred product strategy. Check mate!
- Learning how to best communicate with all your stakeholders takes time and is hard work. So look for people who have already done some of this work. If you see a colleague engage a particular stakeholder well, ask them for their tips on how best to work with that person. You will learn as much in 30 minutes over a coffee with that person, as you may learn in a few months working with that stakeholder, especially if it’s someone you don’t get to spend much time with, such as the CEO or a GM. Never be afraid to ask others for their top tips on engaging your stakeholders.
- Put yourself in their shoes - what do they want to know and what do they need to know? Create empathy with your users - move them from being perceived as ‘someone else’ to some someone your stakeholders really feel for. Acknowledge that some stakeholders can be a little prickly, get ahead of the game and spend more time with them Keep everyone in the loop - people HATE surprises at work Spot patterns in how your stakeholders communicate and replicate them to help them resonate with your message