Get Stakeholders Aligned
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify key stakeholders involved in bringing an idea to market.
- Describe best practices for creating alignment with key stakeholders.
Why Alignment Matters
Bringing an idea to market is never done in a vacuum. It almost always involves a large number of stakeholders. The goal is to align the team, leadership, and organization around what you’re creating. You need alignment on:
- The decisions about what to make.
- The assumptions, rationale, and data driving those decisions.
- The metrics and measurement.
Only then can the vision be properly realized so that business goals and customer needs are met.
Let’s meet the key stakeholders.
Who Are the Key Stakeholders?
Key stakeholders are internal individuals and teams that are directly affected by the outcome of a project and actively contribute to the project. Who makes up the cast of key stakeholders? Let’s take a look.
- The product manager is accountable for getting a product to market that achieves business outcomes. Note: The product manager is accountable for the roadmap.
- Developers and architects identify dependencies, define what’s possible, and determine how to deliver the product. They also build the product.
- UX designers and researchers ensure that user outcomes are identified and achieved, and that the solution is desirable to customers.
- Data and analytics stakeholders determine how to measure performance and define the data strategy.
- Project management makes sure all the parties involved complete their tasks and ensures that the entire process stays on track.
- Leadership sets strategic direction, identifies redundancies across the portfolio, and prioritizes resources.
- And don’t forget other product teams like Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. In an organization with many projects, often serving the same customer, it’s important for everyone to share what they’re working on and understand the business, user, and technical synergies and conflicts.
Advocating for the Vision
While the product manager owns the roadmap, the strategy designer can be a key partner and heavily influence the go-to-market (GTM) process by advocating for customer and user needs. The strategy designer also helps maintain alignment across stakeholders. Go-to-market is crunch time as your product barrels toward the launch date. This stage involves a whole new set of negotiations based on time, prioritizations, and trade-offs.
The strategy designer becomes the advocate in the room who isn’t easily convinced to completely abandon the vision for a different set of urgent tasks competing for the same resources. You can see, for instance, that losing certain elements of a product will significantly decrease the value to the user. Or that the vision has become so watered down that it’s not worth shipping on the launch date, and it’s time to consider delivering a different set of features instead.
As the strategist, you’ve been part of the discussions since the beginning. You can point out important decisions that were made months ago that have now taken a back seat or been forgotten. In short, you can make sure that decisions still align with the vision and meet the needs of the business and the customer.
Let’s take this common scenario: Problems at the GTM stage can arise when the developers don’t understand why they need to build a product in a certain way. Maybe they came into the process late and were just handed a bunch of wireframes with instructions to build it. If they don’t have enough context and background, they can’t make build decisions that align with the vision.
This is where you can help. As a strategy designer you can give the developers the information and background they need to understand the vision. You can listen to the developers’ pain points. And when there are development constraints, you can have meaningful conversations to arrive at a compromise and deliver the best product possible in the most realistic time frame.
Best Practices for Creating Alignment with Key Stakeholders
Key stakeholders (like developers) have a vested interest in the idea you’re bringing to market, but it’s most likely not the only thing they have on their plate. As you’ve just seen, as a strategy designer you’re uniquely able to advocate for the vision across all the stakeholders. And by listening to stakeholder concerns and eliciting their ideas, you can help them align with the project and still achieve their goals.
But how exactly do you help with that alignment? We’ve got some suggestions for you.
| Know your audience | To effectively get everyone on board, you need to know your audience, what they care about, and why. For instance, developers want to know what the product does and why, and how the features benefit the customer. For executives, keep it high-level, and focus on the results and outcomes for the company. Marketing wants to know how the product fits into the market. Luckily, you gathered this information in your early research. |
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Start early |
Don’t try to sell a finished product. Elicit perspectives and create opportunities for critique early and often so that by the time a roadmap is created, the full team is bought in. |
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Orient around outcomes |
Start with value, not tactics. Communicate in a way so that it’s easy to understand what the team is trying to accomplish, the decision-making criteria, and how decisions relate to outcomes. |
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Get them involved |
Ensure your stakeholders are involved in some way, so they feel invested in and committed to the strategy. Inviting critique and feedback is particularly effective. Use 1:1 conversations to build trust and elicit candid perspectives. |
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Create clarity |
No matter your stakeholder audience, focus on communicating the product strategy and vision. Not everyone needs (or wants) to know everything. |
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Anticipate objections |
Expect stakeholder objections every step of the way. Be open and empathetic to their concerns, and keep the focus on customer benefits. |
More information on alignment in earlier phases of the design process can be found in the Alignment as a Strategic Craft module.
Cloud Kicks Stakeholders
When it came time to bring its new features to market, Cloud Kicks ran into some alignment issues among the key stakeholders, primarily around the delivery tracking feature. Though the design team had secured agreement on postponing the feature from all the primary departments that had worked on the prototype—marketing, product, and customer support—they forgot to consult leadership.
Since the feature provided the company with the most visible (and visually appealing) way to service its customers’ biggest pain point (visibility into the delivery process), the CEO overruled the decision and prioritized it as the number-one feature, pushing the Digital Head Start to a later sprint. This meant further delays and changes in priorities, but ultimately the benefits to the customer were too great to ignore.
Getting and keeping stakeholders aligned throughout the process is hard work. Check in at key points or regular intervals to make sure everyone is kept up to date. In the next unit, we discuss how to construct a go-to-market strategy.