AMA: Realtor.com Sr. Director, Product Operations, Casey Flinn on Stakeholder Management

This sounds glib, but you have to fix the goals. You cant achieve win:win when the goals are misaligned.  If you and your internal partner are empowered to change the goals then you need to do the work to pick a new shared team goal. Having misaligned goals is just brutal to people and teams. This is also a great exercise in thinking bigger and more about company/customer/business goals vs. team/individual goals. If this is out of your control, then escalate ASAP. Escalation is not a bad thing. ...Read More

If you believe that your partners are there to help you build the best experiences/products possible, then you should have continuous feedback loops with them not just at the start and finish. The most effective teams include their internal partners in their sprint cadences which look something like this: You are involving them early in the discovery process to see the opportunities you are exploring and the outcomes you are trying to achieve. This is how you can make sure you are aligned from t ...Read More

Lts flip this around - what are the questions our new partners are thinking of, but probably will not ask us? I can gaurantee there are at least four: Will I like working with this person? Can I trust this person? What change is this person going to create? Do we have the same expectations about how we work together? I am framing things this way for two reasons. First, the primary objective when meeting new partners is always to lay down a foundation of trust. A great way to start building that ...Read More

It's often overlooked, but I believe it all starts with being genuinely interested in other people's perspectives. The more diversity you can include in your thought process the better the output will be. And in a culture where the "best idea wins," this sets you up for success because there is a lot of research that shows the best ideas start with the most diverse inputs. People want to feel like their opinions matter and that they are being heard. Being genuinely interested is a way to demonst ...Read More