What do product managers get wrong when trying to influence the C-Suite?

A common mistake most product managers and sometimes even senior product leaders make while convincing c-suite in favor of a particular decision is bringing in tunnel vision related to just their own product area or business vertical. Spoken differently, they fail to treat company over their own team. Analysis that takes into account the holistic view of the company (even if it hurts your own area in short term) brings confidence and conviction with senior leadership. 

The hierarchy of needs when convincing CEOs, CPOs, CSOs etc. is always to treat customer > company > team > self

Overwhelmingly, speaking the wrong language. Get out of the weeds, execs want to hear dollars and cents - business outcomes. Don't talk about user satisfaction in a vacuum, talk about how increasing user satisfaction is going to impact growth. Don't talk about paying down technical debt, talk about mitigating churn risk from outages resulting from technical debt. And so forth.  

3 most common pitfalls I see are: 

1. Not simple enough
2. Not investing into understanding broader context (outside of one's product area)
3. Wrong words-to-numbers ratio

Lack of simplicity is the most common out of these, and it usually manifests itself in long sentences, using jargon and vague words to describe specific (e.g. "solid" results). A good rule of thumb when presenting to C-suite is imagining an exec from a completely different field reading/listening to you. Would a sales leader understand your points without aide, and quickly? If the answer is no, rewrite. Bonus point: always add TL;DR or main point upfront, and then expand into the details.

Broader context, and specifically, being aware and considerate of needs, risks and opportunities outside of your product area is another common challenge. No matter how deep of an expertise you have in your immediate material, if you fail to show your awareness and consideration of the company's entire business, amd ability to seek global optimization, it will hold you back from convincing C-suite.

Lastly, words-to-numbers ratio is a tricky one and often it gets people who are particularly passionate about the topic they are presenting on. They want to tell a story with all the juicy details (whether it's in words or numbers) and bring a barrage of lengthy descriptions or data that does not contribute to the point of the story. Two things to consider are: 

• About 1 out of 3 sentences in your writing/presentation needs to contain a number. More numbers, and it turns your story into a spreadsheet. Fewer numbers, and the story becomes too vague. 1:3 is not a perfect ratio, but using it will force you to evaluate whether your ratio feels right. 
• If you were to communicate your point in only 3-4 numbers, what would they be? Are they prominently positioned in your comms? Are the getting lost among other numbers? 

1. Assuming the C-Suite is right

2. Not coming with a clear decision point to a call

3. Not having sufficient data or research to justify the product investment

4. Over preparing detailed assets without an executive summary and forecast

We can be more tactful and realize we don’t need to rely on logical reasoning alone! To this date, I am still amazed at how one of my colleagues got an executive to change their opinion. We were working on a new product launch at the time and had proposed a pricing bundle that included a feature from another product. Our executive was adamant that we should keep them separate and not bundle. Several meetings went nowhere and we were stuck. At our company the product teams provide weekly updates in a consolidated deck for senior leaders. For several weeks, my colleague purposely included direct customer quotes in the weekly updates. These quotes showed that for our target segment, this feature is a must-have and that our new product will be hugely disappointing without bundling it. Guess what? This slow drip of customer insights worked! When we then met with the executive, our pricing proposal went through.

The biggest mistake is to think that the C-Suite will listen to you because you have a super idea.

If you want to influence the C-Suite, you need to influence all the functions below and demonstrate impact. There is usually no silver bullet, and it takes years to make this happen.