#1: On Disagreements & Documentation
"Disagree & Commit", the Importance of Documentation...
The importance of effective stakeholder management is no secret to those of us in Product Management. In my current job the features my team builds affect several internal stakeholders including Sales, Customer Support, Finance, and Marketing. In the last one year, I have internalized many lessons on how to effectively manage stakeholders and build consensus. Sharing some here today:
#1: On Dealing With Disagreements
Remain Calm: In conversations involving heated discussions and disagreements, it’s important to remain calm and not lose objectivity. Don’t let high emotions get the better of your interactions.
Do the best you can to explain why: why you’re disagreeing/ why you can't deliver / why the product development is moving the way it is etc. Whether its resource constraints or other important projects or other stakeholder asks or tech debt or whatever the reason- help others understand.
Disagree and Commit: Sometimes, stakeholders can be aggressively demanding. You may even get pressure from senior leadership or executives to ship or commit to something that you don’t agree with. Once you have tried the objective discussions and explanations and it hasn’t worked, you may simply need to “disagree and commit”. When that happens make sure you’ve documented that you’re disagreeing and committing.
#2: Document, document, document!
Not every little decision needs to be recorded in a long document especially if you’re in a smaller high trust close knit team. That said, the bigger your team, the more your stakeholders, the greater is the need for documenting decision making. Whether it’s emails or docs or summaries of meeting notes, documentation is critical - especially at larger organizations, especially if you have a vast expanse of stakeholders. There may be high trust among all team members but - people forget, teams get caught up in their own day to day, and a few months later if there are questions or leadership changes or failures then folks may be left wondering why certain decisions were made. If you don’t have them documented or don’t have a record, then that could lead to erosion of trust in the process and in the product team/ product manager.
“Effective teams and healthy relationships are supported by records of the important decisions made after difficult dialogues, and the assignments agreed upon. Good teams revisit these documents to follow up on both the decisions and the commitments.”
~ Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
When decisions are documented, there is little room for ambiguity. This helps drive the right conversations forward. When there are disagreements, communicating clearly and with empathy is the best you can do. While PMs are often in the driver’s seat of important decisions, sometimes you may have disagreements with large groups of stakeholders or with senior leadership - in which case, all you can do is state your case and then move forward.
What have you learnt about stakeholder management from your experiences? Feel free to write back or comment, I’d love to hear your responses or feedback.
What I’m Reading
Twitter Thread - 8 Ways to Leverage AI to save Time
For my next post, I want to try something different. I will ask 3-4 PMs one specific question around building products and share their responses here. If you’re interested in being part of this exercise, please reply to this / email me!
Until next time,
Manan
p.s. If you enjoyed reading this, please share with others who may find it valuable- this will really encourage me to keep writing.
Absolutely agree with having a paper trail! Confluence is my best friend when organizing our projects