AMA: Uber Director of Product, Sirisha m on Stakeholder Management

Making any discussion data driven helps drive meaningful outcomes. Start with understanding why a different team thinks they own the decision, which helps with your conversation. Given decisions lead to outcomes and hence impact KPIs, leveraging that correlation helps with alignment. Clarifying who owns the KPI, which is impacted by the decision helps identify ownership quickly. Once alignment is reached, always make sure to capture the decision/engagement model as a written artifact for future reference.

The structure and frequency of cross functional meetings vary by audience & project phases. With your core development team of engineering, design, data science and productOps, if there is one meeting I recommend - that would be a weekly touchpoint. Try to make every one participate in this touchpoint - mainly to avoid too many 1:1s & message passing that leads to chaos. This cross functional team meeting also helps bring forth unstructured discussions through which new ideas surfaces . You can also use this weekly touchpoint to give business context to the team, unblock each other and many times, just to build the team spirit needed to be effective as a team. When it comes to stakeholders, touch points vary depending on the phase of the project. For a project that is in active development, more frequent touch points help. For initiatives that have launched, lesser frequency is good enough. Frequency also depends on the level of stakeholder e.g., for someone at a VP level, once a month visibility or even async updates might be good enough. Make these engagements valuable - add elements that create discussion points. For someone senior, always include an executive summary. Don't forget to ask for feedback and fine tune the engagement model periodically.

“Saying No” is a soft skill every PM will exercise through his/her career. How to say No is something you will continue to learn and evolve with experience. Some guiding principles on when delivering bad news on prioritization: 1. Make your stakeholder part of the decision making journey. Have them part of the early discussions. 2. Give clear & concise reasoning for the decison. If the reasoning is other higher priorities, take time to explain the why either through data or anecdotal feedback. 3. Sometimes, there are requests from stakeholders which might not fit the prioritization framework but solving the problem adds “magical delight” and could be low hanging fruits. Find ways to make those small wins which go a long way in stakeholder management.

The areas that junior PMs struggle with the most when working with leadership are: 1) communication - An IC PM is in the weeds of their specific charter but not the executive. When asked a question, keeping the response to the right level of verbosity and the right depth is where most junior PMs struggle. 2) Balance between self-reliance and escalation - Many times, when a junior PM is blocked, they either raise concerns too early too often or express concerns in the wrong forums. This can very quickly create noise for the executives losing trust in the ability of the PM to execute.

As a PM, you are always “influencing without authority”. The main factor that helps with influencing is identifying shared goals. Once you have shared goals, the discussion is on even ground. The shared goals could be KPIs around a project or around completion of a job. If there are no obvious shared goals, then make time to understand create one. Ability to connect the impact of the feedback to these goals creates quick action.

As a PM/product lead, success is defined by both quantitative and qualitative metrics. I measure success - be it mine or anyone of the team across 4 pillars. 1. "Impact and ability to be visionary/innovative" - they are more quantitative than the others. For projects that failed, understanding why it failed, understanding the root cause and evaluating if anything could have been done differently is a key factor to define success when measuring impact. Every failed project does not have to be negative impact. 2. "leadership and cross functional collaboration" - These are based on the voice of stakeholders and peers.. I try to complete a 360 feedback loop on this topic every 6 months to measure my success. I encourage my team to do the same as well.

When you are stuck between the disagreement of 2 executives, there is no prescriptive playbook to help resolve this since the solution depends on the people involved, the phase of the company and the complexity of the problem. Some guiding principles to adopt to resolve the gridlock would be: 1. Take time to understand the “why” behind the respective leader's feedback. 2. Add as much context and data on your preferred approach as you can and document everything in written format to drive discussion. 3. Avoid emails for discussion and use synchronous conversations to resolve. 4. If there are other people who can help with reaching an agreement, get their support/feedback. 5. Explore if there is a middle ground strategy that might drive alignment.