Do you have any success/failure story to share around how you managed to influence a difficult stakeholder? Lessons learned?

Friction with stakeholders definitely comes with our jobs. While it can be stressful, frustrating and evening maddening, ultimately I think it also makes us better PMMs. That's my biggest suggestion for how to approach these situations. Ask yourself what can you learn from their pushback? A few years ago I had a sales leader tell me on sales leadership meeting that our play for a specific competitor was completely broken and he was instructing his team not run it anymore. Obviously having this b ...Read More

Oh, geez, I have a LOT of failures to learn from! One of my biggest failures to date was during my time at AdRoll. I was leading PMM and we had a product launching in the attribution space that was having a pretty major identity crisis. Some of the biggest questions at hand: How do we do attribution/incrementality testing better than what exists in the market today? (differentiation) How does a vendor like us, who helps companies run ads, also provide trusted attribution insights across the enti ...Read More

So much of Product Marketing is about information and invisible influence. The challenge is that while Product Marketing doesn't own Product, Marketing, Sales, or Services - we are expected to serve these teams with equal rigor and depth. It's what makes our function both fun and challenging, and there is no shortage of stakeholders to manage at any one given moment. As best as possible, you need to be diplomatic.  I've learned that so much about relationship management is about setting clear an ...Read More

This is a great question, at times we’re quick to talk about successes but very few share examples of failures. We all failed at some point and we probably learned the most from it. No matter how good of a leader you are, there will always be stakeholders that can be difficult to interact with or at times may even become hostile. It’s important to identify these stakeholders early on because they could disrupt or even bring an end to your product launch, GTM plan or project. Here’s a failure exa ...Read More

A difficult or opinionated stakeholder is sometimes the hardest thing but something you all likely encounter in your product marketing career. If you have the luxury of time to observe their working style you can try to adjust your approach on your own. If you don't have that time, make sure you ask others for feedback on how best to work with this person. I once held an important meeting with one of the executive team and thought I had everything prepared. I had asked for topic ideas ahead of t ...Read More