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

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 / goal ...Read More

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 compa ...Read More

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 exa ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 f ...Read More