AMA: Volley VP of Product, Roshni Jain on Stakeholder Management

The best way to do this is to start with building a good relationship. Get to know them as a human, show interest, and share who you are as a person as well. Be proactive and schedule time - use it to ask for their opinion on your work and get feedback - people love sharing their perspective and being asked for feedback and it's a great way to start building trust. Understand their goals and find ways to make their job or life easier. Getting these wins will show your competence and care and are a great start to their openness to listening to you and your ideas. As you get to know them understand what makes them tick and then if you are trying to get their agreement on something follow two simple rules 1) Frame it in a way that aligns with something that is important to them (not, we need to remove this line from our checkout, but we want to improve conversion and sales by X%, if we remove this field we think we can) 2) Adjust your communication style to their personality or preferences - for some it may be data, for others it may be seeing something cool, for others it might be having confidence that we are preventing something very bad from occurring

I would recommend slightly different objectives based on whom you are meeting and building a relationship with, here's the big categories I'd consider with the objectives: * Product, Design, Engineering, Data but not in your direct team - the goal here is to build a great collaborative relationship. Whether they are more senior/ junior, or working a different part of the organization. You want to focus on building trust, understanding and an open line of communication. Additionally, you want to get a strong understanding of their focus areas, their priorities, and why, and make sure they walk away with the same understanding of yours. With that foundation, you'll be well set up for all the types of things that could come your way - a need to work together, a request for or from the other team, a reshuffling so you directly work together, an opportunity to bring something new to the table in partnership. Questions to ask: * What are your priorities for this quarter/half/year? * What are you most excited about? * What are you most worried about? * How could me and/or my team help you with your goals? * What has been working well in the past between our areas? What hasn't? * Marketing and Growth - the goal here is to build a great collaborative relationship. It's really helpful to understand their goals and challenges. Then depending on the organization and how closely these functions work with product you will want to understand what they are looking for from product. It's possible that they are simply looking for clear communication or they may be in a place where they are feeding you lots of customer insights and want to be very involved in creating product strategies and go to market plans. Having this context is critically important to making sure you're being a great partner. Try to find areas where you have a common goal and then approach those with a one team mindset - if you show that you are trying to help them succeed, that will set a very strong foundation. The questions you ask would still be very similar: * What are your priorities for this quarter/half/year? * What are you most excited about? * What are you most worried about? * How could me and/or my team help you with your goals? * What has been working well in the past between our areas? What hasn't? * Skip level or Senior Leader in Any Level - one thing to keep in mind with any conversation with a senior leader is that it's an opportunity - for you to build a great impression. Senior leaders are always thinking about the talent in the organization and these interactions serve to form their perspectives on people on the team whom they don't work with regularly. For a brand new leader coming in who is not in your function, they are trying to understand where things are going well and where they're not and what the opportunities are, in particular in their org, so they'll be looking for your perspective and feedback on these topics. A senior leader in your function will be doing this and also trying to get to know you. Things to keep in mind for the conversations: * Prepare in advance and have a few questions that you want to ask - things you're curious about the business, the product, their function, their vision * Be prepared to share your honest opinions and detail on what's going on

Even if you can't address all of your stakeholder's requests, as a product manager or product leader you want to keep a strong relationship here and ensure that they keep coming to you with their needs and ideas as these will help you have the biggest impact in the longer term. So, your communication here should keep that goal in mind, some simple steps you can take here: 1. Proactively communicate with the stakeholder to tell them where their request landed - very few people ever close the loop and this is very much appreciated 2. Provide context to help them understand what the team is doing and why. e.g., "Our team's mandate this quarter is to improve conversion. As we evaluated all the opportunities, the 3 big swings we are taking are X, Y and Z. We hope that project X will somewhat address what you are looking for, though not exactly. We are excited about the potential for your request ABC and will continue to look for opportunities to address it later this year."