Building Strong Relationships with Stakeholders

Parul Goel at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/AkdJyZop2ok

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why this topic matters: a standoff with Chris

[00:00:00] Hello, everyone. My name is Parul Goel. I am the Director of Product at Indeed for the billing and orders platform, and I'm going to talk to you about building strong relationships with your stakeholders. I thought I would start by telling you a bit about why this topic became important to me. Why am I here talking about it today?

[00:00:18] When I first started my product management career, I had a very different expectation around what my job would be. I thought I would be building capabilities and features, solving customer problems, and just launching feature after feature. So when I realized, "Wait, there are all of these people in different parts of the organization who actually get a say in what am I building, how am I building it, when am I building it," it came as a shock to me, and I have to say, I didn't really take it very well.

[00:00:54] My first project as a product manager was to simplify the customer experience, and I was really excited about it. I had worked really hard with my engineering team and with my user experience team to define this new experience. We were going to launch it, but of course I had to get approval from my new friends, my stakeholders. And one of the stakeholders, I'll call him Chris, wasn't ready to give his approval. His concern was that the experience was too simple, and that it was going to negatively impact his team, his metrics.

[00:01:34] We were at a standoff. Our project couldn't move forward because he wasn't giving his approval. He wouldn't budge, but I also wouldn't budge. I didn't know that the situation was blowing up, and there was this particular meeting where we had a really heated argument, in front of other people, in public, which ended with me in tears. So things had gotten really bad. At that moment, I remember feeling like this is the worst thing that could happen to me. This person is getting in my way, he's not letting me do my job. I was sad, I was frustrated.

[00:02:11] But in hindsight, that was one of the best things that happened to me early in my product management career, because it opened my eyes to what the job really is. It is solving for customer pain points. It is releasing feature after feature. But it's not doing it in isolation. It's bringing your stakeholders along. In fact, today I spend most of my time making sure that everybody in my group, my team, my stakeholders, we are all heading in the same direction.

[00:02:44] After this, I became really interested in the topic. I started observing what other people do: what works, what doesn't work. For many years I reported to a manager who was really good at this, so I learned a lot from her. I tried new things. I had some successes, I had some more failures, but I learned a lot in the process. So what I will share with you today are the three strategies that I have learned to build strong relationships with my stakeholders.

Build relationships before you need them

[00:03:15] Starting with the first one: build relationships before you need them. There is conventional wisdom that says don't wait until there is a fire to dig a well. This applies to stakeholder management, or building stakeholder relationships, as well. If you already have a trusted relationship with your stakeholders, and trust is a key word here, then any collaboration you have with them, whether you need information from them, whether you need support or advocacy from them, even your disagreements, is going to be more productive.

[00:03:57] I want to give you an example from my personal life, actually my husband's personal life. He's someone who's very good at building relationships. This includes his extended family in India, his family and friends in India. He routinely calls them up to check on them, to see how they're doing, and if there is anything he can do to help them. So he's really taken the time to build and nurture these relationships.

[00:04:23] You might have heard that for the last two months or so, India has been really ravaged by the second wave of COVID. The stories coming out of India have been horrible, horrific. People are dying because of shortages of medicines and hospital beds. They don't have access to medicine and oxygen. While this hard story was playing out, my in-laws, both my husband's parents, contracted the virus. They live in India and we live in the US, so we were thousands of miles away. They were really scared, and we felt really helpless. It was a very dire situation.

[00:05:04] But because of the relationships my husband had built with doctors in his family and with his friends in India, he was able to get them the help that they needed. He was able to get them into a hospital. He was able to get them some of the medicines they needed. Most importantly, he had seven of these doctors on his speed dial. He would call them up pretty much on a regular basis and say, "This is what's going on, these are their symptoms, what should I do?" Just having access to that counsel at the time was very valuable.

[00:05:43] I can assure you that this interaction would have looked very different if he hadn't nurtured these relationships. Imagine calling somebody while they're busy and saying, "Oh, remember me? I met you at a wedding five years ago, and I need your help." It wouldn't have worked out the same. So this was a very high-stakes situation, but having relationships in place really paid off.

[00:06:07] Now, I have not learned these lessons the easy way. When I first started, I didn't really know the value of relationship building, so I wasn't really investing in it. I wasn't putting any work towards it. Then I started seeing the value, and I swung the other way. I was like, "All right, I'm going to set up monthly one-on-ones with all my stakeholders." And it was a huge burden on my calendar and theirs. Plus, I was so busy going from meeting to meeting that I didn't really have a strategy for what I was going to say in these meetings. What was my agenda? I didn't really have the time to prepare. I don't think these interactions, these meetings, were really meaningful for my stakeholders. So if anything, it might have backfired. But now I know better.

[00:06:59] This is what I would do differently, and this would be my recommendation to you as well. The first one is to identify who your stakeholders are. Who are the people who are either directly or indirectly impacted by your product? Who has the veto to say no to what you are doing? Make sure each of them knows who you are, what you are working on, and why they should know you. Why should they care?

[00:07:28] But if you have a large group of stakeholders, know that you're not going to be able to build strong relationships with all of them, at least not at the same time, because building relationships takes time. So prioritize a little bit. Apply that skill of prioritization that product managers are known for. Maybe focus on the group that has had the most friction with your team in the past, or the people who are most influential in your context, and focus on them.

[00:07:53] The second thing I would say is to prioritize the quality of time spent rather than the quantity of time spent. This translates into a few things. For one, a meeting is one way of interacting. They might have other ways they prefer. They might prefer Slack or chat. I had a stakeholder who preferred texting, and he told me, "If you need me, text me." So I would text him, and at around eight or nine PM at night he would be like, "Can you talk now?" So I was able to get his time within 12 hours of my request, which was a big deal for me.

[00:08:33] And the third thing is making this interaction meaningful for them, which takes preparation. I spend at least five minutes on each of these stakeholder meetings. I think about: is there something going on in my world that will be useful to them? Is there anything I can tell them so that they're not surprised in the next stakeholder meeting? If I need information from them, I give them context about how I am going to use this information. What are the problems I'm looking to solve with this information? Because they might have other ideas that can help me.

[00:09:10] In general, show up to these interactions, these meetings, well prepared, so that they get value out of it. And if you do this consistently, and have quality interactions, and even offline follow up on whatever commitments you had made, you can see that trust being built between you and your stakeholders. So that's my first principle: build relationships before you need them.

Know that it's about their priorities

[00:09:38] The second one is to know that it's about their priorities. As product managers, we build for our customers. Do you think our customers care about our products? Do they care about Indeed? Do they care about PayPal? Not really. What they care about is finding a job. What they care about is sending money. Our products are just mediums to solve their problems.

[00:10:08] This is true of our stakeholders as well. They have their own priorities. They have their own problems, their own OKRs to worry about. I think it is fair to say that my product is not really top of mind for them. This is the lesson I learned when I became a stakeholder for somebody. This other product manager set up time with me, and he did this beautiful presentation about his vision, his roadmap, his product strategy. What was he building? How was he helping the customers? And towards the end of the meeting he was like, "Well, I need your team to make a commitment that they will align to this timeline, that they will build the thing."

[00:10:50] And he had actually failed to answer the one question that I cared about: why should I get involved in this? What's in it for me? Does it drive my product adoption? Does it help my customer? He was so focused on his plans that he didn't really connect the dots of what's in it for me. And so I felt like, "Wait, this was a waste of my time, this half an hour." Except it made me question: do I show up this way? In my stakeholder interactions, do I make them so one-sided? And the answer was yes, I have done that in the past.

[00:11:23] Going back to Chris, who was a very unhappy stakeholder in my early days as a product manager: the truth was, I had not taken the time to understand what his concerns were. What were his priorities? How was I going to negatively impact them? Had I done that, I could have easily addressed them. The second thing is over-indexing on my product and priorities, which is what this other product manager also did: just talking about my product, my priorities, my roadmap, when really the stakeholder is concerned about their product, their priorities, their roadmap.

[00:12:03] And the third thing is that I have also approached these interactions like a transaction. You scratch my back, I scratch your back: you do what I'm asking you to do for me, and then you will also see benefits in return. But these are relationships. They're not transactions. They don't quite work that way.

[00:12:20] This is what I would recommend instead. To be able to build a strong relationship, you have to invest in learning about their work. Who are their customers? What are their priorities? What are the problems that they're solving for? That way you can find opportunities to help them. The second thing is that they are your stakeholder, which basically means there is some overlap between their world and your world. Make that connection for them, do the analysis for them, so they can really see why they should care. Speak their language. Of course, talk about your vision, talk about your roadmap, but using their language. Make it relevant to them.

[00:13:05] And the third thing, and this is an important one, is to be transparent. Over time you will realize that you're not going to be able to start adding value to these stakeholders on day one. For some of my stakeholders, especially in Ops, I have actually made their lives worse on day one, because I have pushed out something with manual processes, but over time I have improved it for them by automating. If there is trust, I tell them this upfront: "Okay, after phase one there will be some additional work for your team, but starting in phase two we will start automating." It is a difficult message to deliver, but being able to deliver it, being able to be upfront and transparent, also contributes towards building that trust. So that's the second strategy: give them a compelling reason to care about your product, your project.

Lean in when there is misalignment

[00:14:04] And now the third one, which is to lean in when there is misalignment. I promise you that there are going to be misalignments. In my product management career, at any given time, I have had at least one stakeholder who is not aligned, usually more. And today, most of my job really is to keep people aligned. So when that happens, number one, know that it's not you and it's not them. This is just the nature of the job. This is why stakeholder management is such a big thing in the world of product managers. It is bound to happen. But how you show up when this happens, how you show up when things are not going well in a relationship, is what matters.

[00:14:56] Looking back, even here I have had some missteps. I was kicking off a new initiative, and one of my stakeholders had a reputation for being challenging. I knew that we were not on the same page. I was trying to get my product live as quickly as possible, so I was optimizing for timeline, and she was optimizing for efficiency. She was looking for automation. So I knew there was misalignment there, but she wasn't very engaged in our initiative. She didn't show up for stakeholder meetings. Her team didn't participate in the requirements gathering. And I was like, "All right, this is my lucky break."

[00:15:41] So I continued with my team to build the product. We did the requirements, we built it, we worked really hard to take it to market. But before we could launch it, we had to get her approval. We had to do a demo for her and get her to sign off. How do you think that demo went? Do you think that just because she didn't show up for these meetings, her requirements had changed? No. In that demo, where my product and engineering teams were present, she was like, "No, this product is not ready. There's at least three more months of work. I can't sign off on it."

[00:16:17] For my team, who had worked very hard, nights and weekends, to launch this product on time, this was a very demotivating message. And at this point, the consequences of delays were much worse. We had already promised our customers that they would get this capability on this day. So I had to do a lot of risk mitigation, a lot of damage control, to get things back on track. But looking back, I had played a big role in making this mess, because even though I knew there was misalignment, I had continued. I had made the decision to go forward without addressing that misalignment.

[00:17:03] Looking back, these are some of the mistakes I have made when there has been misalignment. One is taking it personally. Even when I was talking about Chris a moment ago, I said he was doing it to me, he was getting in my way. With the second stakeholder, because she had a reputation for being challenging, it was easy to buy into that and make her the villain, which might or might not be true. But the truth is it doesn't help you solve the problem, because they are not going to change. You have to find solutions around it.

[00:17:33] The second thing is taking the path of least resistance. In this case, I ignored this person, which was my path of least resistance. I have seen other people give in to their difficult stakeholders, not because they agree with them, but because they think, "Well, let's just move forward." Neither of them will get you the best outcome for your product or your customers. And the third thing is that I've had this crazy idea that all of my stakeholders should be super happy with me, like I'm going to make all of them happy, and that's just not a realistic goal.

[00:18:09] These are the things I would recommend instead. If there is a misalignment, you might be frustrated, you might be angry, you might never want to see that person's face or open an email from them again. But do the opposite: over-communicate. Especially if you're looking to build strong, resilient relationships, this is the time to lean in. Make sure they clearly understand what your goal is. What is the information that you're using to make decisions? Because a lot of the time, people make different decisions when they have different information. So if you communicate, if you lay your cards on the table, "This is what I have, this is why I'm doing this," hopefully they will do the same. And when everybody has the same information, there are better chances of reaching the same conclusion.

[00:19:09] The second thing you can do: let us say all of you do have the same information, but you still have different ideas of what should happen next. In that case, that is a very, very basic lack of alignment, which is that you're not aligned on goals. This was the case with the stakeholder I just talked about. I was optimizing for time to market, she was optimizing for efficiency. Had we aligned on that goal, the rest of the discussion would have been much easier. It's a completely different conversation. So when you over-communicate, you can actually get to the root of the problem and solve for that, rather than addressing the symptoms, which will continue to haunt you if you don't.

[00:19:54] And finally, redefine success. You're not going to make all of your stakeholders happy. That cannot be your goal. You're really trying to build for your customers, to do the best for your customers. With your stakeholders, as long as you have given them complete transparency, as long as you have heard them, as long as you have tried to address their concerns to the best of your ability, that's good enough. Most of the time, when you do these things, even if you're on opposite sides, it doesn't really hurt your relationship, because they know that you're coming from a good place.

[00:20:40] So that's my third strategy. I would recommend that instead of running away from misalignment, you run towards it, go through it, work through it. This will go a long way in building strong relationships.

Summary: Chris today

[00:20:55] I just want to summarize the three strategies once again. Build relationships before you need them. Know that it's about their priorities, and focus on them. And finally, when there is misalignment, try to work through it rather than around it.

[00:21:13] To close, I wanted to tell you a little bit more about Chris. Today, Chris is one of my biggest cheerleaders. He's a mentor. He is somebody I go to when I need advice. We were able to not only recover from the early, not very healthy dynamic we had, we were able to get our relationship to a really good place. And what that taught me is that managing stakeholders, building relationships with them, is like any other skill. It's like juggling, it's like learning to ride a bike. These are things where you have to do them to learn them. Of course you will fall, of course you will drop a ball, but the more you do them, the better you will get. So if you have any missteps, if you make any mistakes, know that they are part of the process. Just learn from them and move on.

[00:22:12] Thank you so much for listening to my talk. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I also have a podcast for women in tech called Unseen Battles, so if that interests you, check it out. Thank you.