AMA: 15Five VP of Product, Andrew Clark on Stakeholder Management

I've tried to drive a writing culture in every team I've been on—with varying degrees of success. I don't think there's a more effective way to drive alignment, especially for remote teams. I'm a big fan of providing pre-reads for meetings, so that everyone comes in to the meeting with the same context. Meetings are slow when each person involved is figuring out what the meeting is truly about at a different pace. Anchoring around a written document helps keep everyone focued. Writing tends to s ...Read More

This one is interesting.  If your goals are truly inversely correlated, I'd say there is something wrong with the top-line goals. That would suggest misalignment or lack of clarity higher in the org. If it's more a case of mismatch in focus—say, your primary goals are around customer retention, and you're collaborating with stakeholders from sales—you want to optimize around lowest-effort, highest-impact projects for that team. You're going to spend the majority of your time and resources on cur ...Read More

Yes and no. I think of these relationships in terms layers of depth. Design and Engineering are, of course, your deepest stakeholder relationships. You're building a product together, so the dynamic is fundamentally different. Customer Success (and Support) should be the next layer. They should generally have a better understanding of the product than your go-to-market stakehodlers, and the time they spend with customers usually leads to more specific insights. This relationship can and should b ...Read More

I flinched at the word "approval" here. I don't like the idea that Product would be seeking roadmap approval from other departments in the org. What you really want is buy-in. You want your key stakeholders to be as confident and excited about the roadmap as you are.  Here's how to make that happen: 1) Provide channel(s) for continuous input and take that input seriously. Stakeholders will make sure their teams to provide good input so long as they see how that input influences the roadmap. You ...Read More

Here's one that I don't think gets enough love: humility. Product people are very smart*, and it takes a lot of confidence to say no to a series of good ideas just so you can get to a great one. Very smart, confident people aren't always the most humble. Humility, though, is a key trait as a PM or Product leader. Product work is inexact, and big misses happen. A PMs ability to recognize their missteps early, acknowledge them with the team, and set things on the right course will save time, bandw ...Read More