How do you work towards win/win situations with stakeholders who's top-line goals are inversely correlated to your top line goals?

I love this question! It happens a lot and working through it is part of our role as PMs. There are a few layers to my approach here: First, start with building the relationship. (I hope this theme is clear by now ;-). While your goals may conflict, at a higher level you are playing for the same team, and having constructive, trusting relationships is a key for any team’s success. You don’t need to agree, but at least seek to understand and show empathy. Second, focus on higher level framing, ra ...Read More

This one is interesting.  If your goals are truly inversely correlated, I'd say there is something wrong with the top-line goals. That would suggest misalignment or lack of clarity higher in the org. If it's more a case of mismatch in focus—say, your primary goals are around customer retention, and you're collaborating with stakeholders from sales—you want to optimize around lowest-effort, highest-impact projects for that team. You're going to spend the majority of your time and resources on cur ...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

If you do feel that goals are inversely correlated, I believe it's important to outline the impact of a potential solution on the other person's goals and on your goals. There will be solutions where the impact on someone else goals might be greater than the impact on your goals, and that might be acceptable. However, what you don't want is a watered down solution which doesn't meet your goals or that is detrimental to the customer or your organisation. In this scenario you need to be able to ex ...Read More

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

In my experience, time horizon and top customers can be the two biggest drivers of conflicting goals. Examples: Product is building tomorrow's vision – but Sales and Customer Success need to sell what is in the product today. As a Product leader, it can be challenging to justify working on feature iterations and bug fixes when you are also expected to deliver a completely new experience that will solve or negate those code red issues in a few months. The main questions I ask in these situations ...Read More

If your higher ups are optimizing for rational goals delivered thru the product you are building, then thats great. If not, then its them who are having a hard time curating the right objectives for the company. So, to answer this question and minimize this, focus on the bigger picture: the shared company objective. So identify common ground, whether it’s growth or customer success, and frame your goals within that. For example, if you decide to involve the engineering team instead of the design ...Read More