Hello and welcome into another episode of Lessons in Product Management. I'm your host, Jon Fontenot. And on today's episode, we're going to talk about how to create a win-win with stakeholders.
First and foremost, if you've ever heard me talk about stakeholder management before, that's not the phrase I use to describe it. If you're treating your cross-functional partners as distant stakeholders you're already doomed for trouble the real problem that product managers have with quote-unquote managing stakeholders is the fact that we
treat them like they're not part of the process. We treat them as if they're some distant entity that's a blocker to our progress. And that's a fundamentally flawed way to view.
what we should consider are cross-functional partners. Think about it. If we don't have a close relationship with product marketing, with sales, with the various marketing departments, customer support customer success Whatever your organization looks like You're not the one who is selling and supporting your product you need partnership
for your product to be successful in the long term. And if your cross-functional leaders are not bought into your strategy, that's going to create escalations to your leadership. And it's going to create headwinds to progress. So the way to circumvent that is to create a partnership with your cross-functional peers, with your team, with your boss. with your upper leadership, your cross-functional leadership, making sure that they're bought in and brought in to the process, right?
And one of the only ways to do that is to make them feel part of the process. Nobody likes to be surprised, right? If your boss has been grading you in terms of performance,
on expectations that were never set, that wouldn't be very fair, would it? Well, in the same way, if your sales team and marketing team has no context or no clue as to why you're building what you're building, and then you just drop it on their desk as a big surprise, that's going to be just as disconcerting and discombobulating to them as it would be to you if your boss pulled you into a one-on-one and said, why aren't you performing in these factors?
that they never expressed you were being graded on. It's not fair. And we need to start shifting our thinking as a product community, as a product discipline, to start bringing in our stakeholders early. And the upfront work going upstream to solve the problem is gonna pay dividends down the road. So what does this look like in practice? I'll give you an example.
I worked for a company with legacy systems with leadership that was very used to being sales led and sales driven. And this is how the organization worked. This is how the, the GM of the division. was used to running things, and for a long time it made sense. There were some new product folks that were brought in, some new engineering leadership, and a new perspective that was brought forth.
But by and large, the organization was, you know, pretty much confound to a sales led approach. And one of the breakthroughs we had. came in the fact where I was given responsibility over a suite of products that were add-ons to the primary product, right? The core. the core system that most of these other systems plugged into. And this business's model for growth was to acquire and integrate, right? Every product that they would acquire, they would try to integrate, but it was.
You know integration is a pretty loose term you had a bunch of disparate products that maybe had an API connection into the mothership so to speak but They had their own logins, their own authentication, their own user interface. And it very much felt like you were in multiple products because you were. And really the only integration was you can get data from those add-on products to the mothership. So we took a customer-focused approach to the problem.
Because there were probably six different products with six different logins just for a salesperson who would never log into the mothership product because they didn't need to. It was more for the accountants and the finance people. to get financial data out of. And we said, well, what if we had a unified product from a user standpoint?
where we start taking all this functionality and we bring it into one product that, you know, the two or three core personas who are mostly using these products and would never log into the primary product. Why don't we give them one experience? And based on what they, you know, they purchased from us, they can experience that functionality of whatever they got. one of the headwinds one of the pushbacks that we anticipated which this is key anticipating where the pushback had come based on
where the rest of the org is incentivized, right? So we knew this was a sales-led culture. They liked having separate products because they could have different quotas. They had different products they could sell as upsell. And it made sense from a sales perspective and their goals to have separate products because it simplified things. So we had to take the intent of how do we keep this simple.
But how do we start changing how we deliver this product in the way that's best fit for the customer and for the user? And so... Outside of the shortcomings that each individual product had, which we wanted to address in time, we had to take this more bigger picture strategic approach to how are we going to...
reposition this product long-term that really the majority of our users would be actually using. So anticipating that the pushback around a unified product that they couldn't sell individually, we started to shape and craft what this product could be and how we would need to engineer it in order to...
make sure that it still fit into our operational and sales processes. So we treated each individual product like a module that could be turned on or turned off based on What we sold to the customer and if they wanted to upsell later, that's great Fill out the contract get them to sign it and turn the module on and this way we could create a win-win with
with our stakeholders especially in sales and marketing for not being incredibly disruptive to their processes and we would still create a win for the customers and for the users by delivering an experience that was modern, that made sense, and that really took some of the best of worlds of these individual products.
and was able to strip away a lot of the bad user experience a lot of the noise and really deliver something that was great and so this is something that we were able to present to our sales leadership our marketing leadership our gm and it's something that was well received because we thought about their incentives and what they cared about and the potential pushback we could get if we weren't thoughtful about how we approached the problem.
right sometimes it's product people we get so focused on the customer problem we lose sight around the business and even product managers that claim to be business focused and customer focused Often just think about revenue and the goals that we have or the objectives that we have as a product org. But if we're truly going to do our jobs well, we have to think about.
how our business operates and how our current operational model could be a challenge to what we're trying to do and how we're trying to move the business forward and how do we create a win-win.
across the board without sacrificing the opportunity upside or the customer value or all the things that we aspire to do in our craft as product people but still be able to deliver a great outcome that our cross-functional partners can buy into, appreciate and understand, which at the end of the day is going to pay massive dividends in us.
being able to do our jobs effectively and produce the outcomes we want. So I hope this was helpful. I would love to hear any feedback from you. Please drop a comment. In the comments section, if you're on Spotify, there's a place where you can put comments. But regardless of where you stream, make sure to hit that, that follow or subscribe button. Connect with me on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear your feedback. If you're interested.
and coming on the podcast and have some juicy topics that you'd love to discuss or some things that you're seeing in the industry that you want to rant about and go back and forth on. We'd love to have you on. Please hit me up on LinkedIn. and would be glad to bring you on the show. So until next time, thank you again for joining me for another lesson in product management.