AMA: Skilljar Director of Product Marketing, Sonia Moaiery on Stakeholder Management

In general treating people with respect while also balancing holding firm ground with your opinion can be challenging. There are two principals I like to keep in mind that a coach gave me once: 1) Assume good intent - unless someone has shown you over and over that they dont have good intent, always assume that someone is doing their best with the tools/resources/time they have 2) Use curiosity - instead of questioning someones approach and offering a solution, come at it with curiosity. For example, don't say "I would've done it like this" you can instead say "I'd love to understand why we chose that strategy over X strategy" - this is less combative and acknowledges that it's a team/company decision and also shows that you're seeking to understand. A popular situation I see come up is also when two teams have overlapping responsibilities. I try to step into those situations with the attitude of : "hey, we're working on similar things, I'd love to hear about your work and share mine so we're not duplicating efforts and amplifying each others work. Hey maybe I'll even take something off your plate!" People get easily frustrated when multiple departments are working on similar problems, but I actually think its a GOOD thing when multiple teams are tackling the same problem from different angles. For example, let's take product adoption. There is likely folks within product, customer success, PMM etc. thinking about how to drive adoption of a certain feature and it's okay - especially if you're in a smaller company where folks are wearing a lot of hats. As long as you're being clear who is owning what tactics to reach the bigger goal. Lastly, I'll just point out a few phrases I learned to take out of my vocabulary early on in my career and some helpful reframes. I even forget these sometimes, no one is perfect :) But keep these in mind not just with your manager, but with your peers, your direct reports etc. * That's not my job --> That's not the priority right now. Should it be? * I dont have bandwidth for that --> That's not the priority right now. Should it be? * I have no control over that --> I'm not sure how I would solve for that today with the tools/resources I have. I could talk to X person/peer/friend/manager and see if they have any good ideas for us. * I've never done that before, I don't know how --> That's not a challenge I've run into before or my area of expertise. Do we know anyone internally has this skillset that I could learn from? * I should've gotten credit for that --> I played a big role in that project and I value recognition, I was disappointed. * We can't do that with X tool/person/team --> How were you imagining we execute that? What combination of tools and people do you think would help us ? * We've already tried that before, it didn't work --> When we tried that in the past, we didn't see great results because of XYZ. But, we could consider a version of that idea by changing XYZ.

Every company is different so for product launches but here are the critical stakeholders and questions to ask yourself for each that should cover 90%: What kind of prospect or customer is this most relevant to? Who will care about it? Is it mostly prospects and if existing customers, what kind of customer? Existing customers - could be one of or all of your personas: administrator, champion, user, billing contact etc. Could be relevant to one vertical or industry. Could be relevant to one company size (e.g. SMB vs. Mid Market vs. Enterprise). Could be relevant to a subset of customers who use a specific feature or salesforce integration Once the external audience is clear, then you can think about which stakeholders and functions in your organization matter. You should think about these functions and these questions id ask to determine how 'vital' they are: * Product - always unless what you're launching is a demand gen, marketing asset like a report etc. * Sales / Marketing - will this make a big impact on your external narrative in the market? will it materially change how Sales might demo? * Design - will we need a high volume of design assets? * Customer Success - will this make a big impact on retention? how important is adoption of this feature for our business? * Customer Support / Customer Education - will we need training/documentation to get ahead of customer questions? * Implementation - will this be something implementation will need to support? * RevOps/BizOps - will this require a change to our contract/pricing/invoices? A kick off call with all of these functions where folks can raise their hand for how involved they want/dont want to be is important.

I'd first seek to understand why there may be an innovation stall that you may not be aware of. Below is what I commonly see. If you know the 'why' it'll better help inform how you might proceed. * Product leadership is changing - it may be happening in the background of someone on the way out, or someone new being brought in. Usually in these times, CEOs can be hesitant to invest heavily in new products and features (vs. just maintaining current) before a new leader joins. * Product strategy / goals are changing - With or without a leadership change, they may be changing their north star metrics so are going back to the drawing board which means they're likely re-evaluating the whole roadmap. Perhaps you're no longer focused on acquiring new users, but retaining the ones you have. * M&A - your executive team may be considering acquiring a company, or you're getting acquired, or ownership is changing. * Bugs, maintenance, platform instability- the prod/eng team has gotten a ton of feedback from existing customers about bugs, existing features or uptime and so the eng team is entirely focused on keeping the lights on, so to speak. While this isn't a product marketers favorite scenario, it is the reality sometimes! To get insight into the 'why' - I'd also come to the table with your product counterparts (whether that's a chief product officer or a junior PM) with curiosity and an observation and ask something like: "Ive noticed that our shipping velocity has slowed down versus where we were X months/years ago. Have you noticed that too? That will open the door for conversation on why that might be and how you might be able to get back on track faster so that you're not waiting around 3-6 months for a new strategy to get in place. Also, your product leader may not be engrained with individual PM teams the way you are, so they may not even realize that innovation had stalled. A great way to navigate during these 'transition' times as PMM, is to turn to an often overlooked strategy—enhancing existing features rather than just launching new ones. Find out what products and features are most highly correlated with customer retention and focus on campaigns on driving adoption of those. If you don't know what those features are, now is a great time to work with a data scientist or get access to your product usage data yourself and do that analysis. I'd also say that product is not the only function responsible for bringing new developments to the table. As the PMM, and often the voice of the customer/prospect, we should be empowered to share our customer insights and influence where the roadmap should head and what features to prioritize! Product may have 'insights blindspots' that only you can open their eyes to! My last note on this - some organizations prioritize shipping fast and it is a critical part of their DNA and culture. This is an incredibly important facet and variable I consider when looking at new roles. There are pros and cons for a product marketer- high shipping velocity can make back-to-back launches a huge part of your job. But if that's incredibly important to you, and its just not part of the culture of the organization you're in, it's worth re-evaluating if this company is right for you.

I rely on a mix of tactics. Sorry for all the acronyms, I did my best to spell them out as I know every company works differently. * OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) Shared at the start of the quarter. I will proactively pull my OKRs out of wherever they're documented for the whole company (Lattice, Asana, slides, a doc etc.) for just myself / my PMM team specifically and share that with my cross functional stakeholders in 1:1s and review it live. This gives them a preview of "here's what I'm focused on for the quarter" so when I may have to say no to other priorities that come up throughout the quarter, its not a surprise. And as a nice hack for myself: As the quarter goes on, I usually link to relevant docs for each OKR so that when it comes time to do performance reviews, I remember what I've done! * QBRs (Quarterly Business Review) Shared at the end of the quarter. If my key cross functional stakeholders do not attend my department's quarterly business review (a conversation about of what your team accomplished) then I will share them on the contents of my slides so they understand where we've been and where we're going. * 1-1s, weekly or biweekly throughout the quarter: Obvious, but as a PMM you should have bi-weekly meetings with your product leaders, enablement leaders and DG or content leaders - at minimum. There are definitely others but depends on your business. If you're not using an AI note taking app (I love Granola!) - get one now. This has really transformed how present I can be in 1-1s without worry of jotting down to-dos. * PMM or Product Newsletter, monthly/quarterly this is usually something I don't implement right away until I feel my team is in a rhythm. This is a great way to collaborate with product on the key pillars of the product strategy, the key features/projects that ladder up to them and key metrics to track. Depending on your goals, you can send it to the entire company, just GTM, just marketing etc. My big recommendation is to leave it open for comments, questions and input. Also, make it fun! It should not be a drag to read! * Post Mortems: After a big, big project - launching a new product, new campaign, a product event etc. I always have a post mortem meeting for cross functionals where I prepare a deck in advance to talk about what worked , what didn't and key metrics we said we were going to track - and provide an opportunity for folks to weigh in and discuss.

I think the most important thing is to be clear with your key cross functional stakeholders at the top of the quarter what your OKRs or key priorities are. If your company doesn't have an OKR process that are "waterfalled" (aka company priorities inform --> dept priorities inform--> function priorities info --> your individual priorities) you can still set goals for yourself for the quarter. I share these with all key stakeholders at the top of a quarter as a way to facilitate trade off conversations to outline what are the most important/urgent things to solve. This helps to reduce the number of asks that come in-quarter that may be unrealistic. If you're proactive about what your goals are, people are less likely to ask you to change them. However, markets change, customers change, new events happen, new metrics show new problems, - its always good to be open to changes to your priorities in the quarter. But having initial goals helps you have a 'trade off' conversation vs. just adding new priorities to your list.