“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” – Steve Jobs
As Steve Jobs rightly said about the prioritization of their product line. Being a Product Manager we have to collaboratively work with multiple stakeholders from Senior executives, technical team, sales, marketing and support teams, customers. The need of the hour is these are different teams, but working towards a single goal as the product’s success. The priority of the items for the product or requests vary for each team. Each team will think that those are the priority items in their point of view. As a Product Manager, you have to listen to their consensus and take the best decisions for the product’s success.
Top 5 Handy Tips
In this blog, I am going to share the top 5 handy tips to handle the needs of product’s stakeholders. The tips are below:
- Collect
- Prioritize
- Engage
- Communicate
- Accomplish
Collect
Product Managers need to collect the needs and thoughts from all the product stakeholders. This can be achieved through meetings with them. For the internal stakeholders mostly the CEO, Senior executives, an effective way is to have regular weekly meetings to discuss with a solid agenda about how the product is progressing. For the external stakeholders mostly the customers, the good way to have customer interviews, and sending out surveys to get the inputs from the large set of audiences.
Prioritize
Most of the New product managers are failing on this and they are treating all the stakeholders the same and their needs. This is the most important thing needed to take care of by the PM. The collected needs should be prioritized to take it to the next level, which is the implementation of the need into the feature.
Engage
After collecting the needs, prioritizing, and implementation phase the PM should engage all the stakeholders in the process. This helps all the stakeholders to understand their priorities and most importantly, they are also involved in this whole process.
Communicate
While taking care of the customers’ feedback, the product manager won’t be able to take care of all their feedback. When the feedback is aligned with the product/business vision, then it will be taken and it won’t be taken when it is not aligned. When the decision is finally taken as a team, it has to be communicated clearly to all the internal and external stakeholders of the product.
Accomplish
As a product manager, you have to work closely with the stakeholders and it is not an easy job to achieve the success of the product.
When you are able to mostly follow the above 4 tips consistently, you will be able to accomplish the goals with grand success without any hassles. At the end of the day, you may not be able to make everyone happy. But be cautious and always make the business team who is funding the product happy about the progress. After completing the feedback from the customers and stakeholders make a habit of updating them that their feedback is rolled out to the live environment.