AMA: GitHub Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Stakeholder Management

My current product team consists of four direct reports who are all senior product managers. My job as a director is to create distinct areas of responsibility (AoRs) for these PMs to deeply understand customer problems, conduct discovery and research with their design and engineering (tech lead) peers, scope and propose initiatives, and then greenlight them to go on the roadmap only when we have sufficiently reduced the level of ambiguity that we know how such initiatives will move the needle o ...Read More

First, get good at written communications -- both as a writer and a reader. One of the most impactful lessons that I took away from the Amazon Working Backwards book by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar is how much they focus on crafting and refining written narratives like the six-pager or the PR/FAQ. Not only is the information density per hour higher for someone who is reading it (i.e., you can convey more information in a shorter period of time using the written word), but it also ensures that poor ...Read More

First, if you truly have stakeholders whose goals are 180 degrees opposite from yours, that's an alignment problem in the organization's executive leadership team and you have to decide whether that's something you believe you can change. But in my experience it's rarely this clear cut. Nobody has a product team that's trying to increase revenue only to have a sales team that's trying to minimize revenue, for example. More often than not it boils down to a conflict between things that appear mut ...Read More

There are some commonalities and some differences. First and foremost, across all constituents, I always promise that product management will always listen to them, carefully consider their feedback and advice, but we may not do what they want. This isn't to be mean. Many constituents not worked with truly empowered, autonomous product teams, so they don't understand why product management is not just a department of project managers to shepherd through work orders that they are issuing in the f ...Read More

Since I have experience on both sides of the aisle, I can agree that this is definitely a complex relationship! PM and PMM are two of the toughest roles involved in bringing products to market, because of the high degree of uncertainty that each job entails and the need to tailor each role's work to both product and organizational maturity. I think there are three focus areas for creating and maintaining a great relationship with PMM: 1. Clear roles and responsibilities. If you haven't already c ...Read More