AMA: WooCommerce Director of Product Management, Payment partners and POS, Sourav Debnath on Stakeholder Management

Product Management is the craft of - identifying and defining the underlying customer problems (User Research) deciding what problems to solve to create the targeted value or impact (Product Strategy) monitoring/steering (which sometimes could lead to a pivot) towards the targeted value/impact (Product Stewardship) iterating on the above Product Marketing looks into - defining customer value driven in solving the problems targeting and positioning the product to the identified customer iterating ...Read More

Building products are all about identifying and solving problems for your users. In short it's all about answering the Why, Who, What and How. I 'll explain the key drivers of each of these across multiple teams and stakeholders. At all phases, it's always a good practice to keep all stakeholders in the loop so that they can participate and influence vs. being at the receiving end. Product Discovery - Identifying problems is the Why. Why is something a problem, once we have established that it i ...Read More

It's a best practice to keep all stakeholders in the loop from proposal to delivery. The drivers (team) at different stages of product discovery or development could change, however keeping all stakeholders in the loop ensures that they are able to actively track, participate and influence vs. being on the receiving end. This also brings clarity in capacity planning across multiple stakeholders from the proposal phase. Robust documentation bolsters communication while also keeping an audit trail ...Read More

C-suites have short time in hand and attention spans. They want the most impactful updates in a precise, succinct and bulleted format. I normally take these steps when updating or answering C-suites - imagine that I am explaining it to an 8-year old i.e. I have to keep the narrative simple and clear follow a good news (progress, impact) / bad news (blockers, risks, failures) model with clear points of action and learnings for both keep it short and not share any unnecessary details that could be ...Read More

A lack of clarity on area of ownership vs. area of influence and leading with emotion vs. rationale/logic are two key reasons that I think lead to disagreements. Having perfect alignment will be rare, however if we can follow these steps, we can significantly bring down disagreements - baseline from the very beginning that every stakeholder has the best interests of the product in mind and their inputs are valuable clearly identify the owners and influencers at each stage of the product keep an ...Read More

Product intuition is a sixth sense about what the real problem is, what could be the value created and what should a solution feel like. It's a mix of nature and experience and can stem from anyone not necessarily Product Managers. Of course, its an important muscle for a Product Manager to develop. However it needs a shift of mindset to be innately observant and curious not just with their designated product areas but with products that they interact with on a day to day basis whether that's di ...Read More