How do you influence people who are not aligned on the same objective (a different team with different goals) to move the needle on an interdisciplinary project?

Shared goals are key. Show how your collaboration benefits their specific objectives. First, understand their perspective. Here's my 7-step influence framework:

1. Build Relationships: It all starts here!

2. Excite them with data & ROI: Facts and figures win hearts.

3. Collaborate on strategy & vision: Involve them in the process.

4. Set clear, actionable goals: Everyone needs a north star.

5. Plan & Assign with timelines: Structure breeds clarity.

6. DACI chart: Define roles and avoid confusion.

7. Internal comms & relationships: Nurture connections & celebrate wins.

Let's pull back from this question because it does not provide a great premise to build on. Every for-profit business has the same objective of making money profitably. Making money profitable can be further subdivided into business metrics around acquisition, which can be further subdivided into business metrics around marketing and sales, which can be further subdivided into metrics around each stage of the funnel.

Successfully influencing stakeholders requires finding the lowest subdivision for each relationship where collaboration would be meaningful and impactful. Once you've identified the objective, then I would take the following steps:

1. Build Relationships with your stakeholders: Approach every stakeholder like a product marketer to learn their pains and what motivates them

   1. Learn their pains: Identify what's preventing them from being successful today

   2. Learn their gaps: Identify what resourcing they wish they had but can't cover

   3. Learn what great looks like: Identify what the ideal state of the job-to-be-done

   4. Learn how they think PMM can help: Identify what their current beliefs of product marketing are

2. Sell Your Projects Benefits: PMMs sell ideas. You can connect the dots for each stakeholder to help them understand how your work helps them achieve or exceed their goals faster and/or easier.

3. Seek Executive Support: If you can't sell the stakeholder, move up the ranks and find a champion who will sell your project for you. Do not be afraid to bring in their boss or your boss to gain alignment around a shared goal.

4. Celebrate Every Little Success: Stakeholders may be wary of the relationship initially. Publicly celebrate each success and highlight how your shared work is getting you closer to your shared goal(s).

This is probably one of the critical skills for a PMM to have, influencing without formal authority or aligned goals. I wish a had a silver bullet type of answer but the reality is, it depends! Ultimately, I try to build a solid biz case consistent of clear timeline, scope, asks, etc. and then work with xfn peers to get early input and feedback. From there, I'll develop a critical path to getting buy-in and decisions by utilizing a DIN (Decision, Input, Notify) framework, commonly used across YouTube/Google. Identifying the critical decision makers early and your path to getting to them is essential in getting buy-in for your project. Below is a slightly more detailed view on my general approach (used at YouTube, Google, and Spotify) for aligning XFN on the same objective/project:

1. Build a solid biz case and get early feedback:

   • Do your homework. Before making your ask, you must deeply understand the teams/people you're working with and their respective OKRs or goals. Without this understanding, it's near impossible to convince others to why they should be aligning to your proposed objective. Ultimately, it will be a trade-off decision for other teams.

   • Timeline and scope: Think through time horizon and scope of your project. Is this a small experiment that you're looking to run and get data back from to inform a larger proposal? Is this an annual objective, quarterly objective, or something else?

   • Define success metrics: What's the goal and how will we know if we're successful? Do you have the measurement infrastructure in place to quantify your results? How often will you report on progress?

   • Capture proposal in a brief memo (1-2 pages). Once you have a solid understanding of the details above, you'll need to capture details in a memo (or slides, whichever is preferred at your company). Questions to answer include but not limited to: What is the scope of the proposed project? What involvement / support do you need from other teams? Is there a budget requirement What is the business need and is it time-sensitive? What are the goals and how are you measuring success?

   • Get feedback early! Identify peers in respective orgs that can provide early feedback.

2. Layout the critical path to getting buy-in and decision. Next step is dependent on company culture, how input is gathered and ultimately how decisions are made. It's critical to deeply understand this process so that you're being as efficient as possible (not wasting people's time), and getting to the decision as soon as possible. A simple DIN (Decide, Input, Notify) framework will come in handy here as you think about all the stakeholders you're working with and what DIN category they fall into. Identify your "critical path" of decision makers, forums, and champions.

   • Build stakeholder list and assign DIN status for each person. There should be very few D's, likely one leader from each XFN team.

   • Determine ultimate decision makers and work backwards to identify forums and flesh out workback timeline.

   • Note: Feedback is a gift, how you respond to feedback has on impact on how stakeholders will feel about working with you in the future. Throughout the process, be sure to listen and make people feel like their feedback has been received. A frustrating thing for partners is when they actually spend time reviewing your doc, adding thoughts and then their ideas are dismissed or disregarded. This is critical because it's likely that you will be working with these people often. What's also important is to be decisive and clear on how feedback is or is not incorporated. You will never be able to please everyone!

At some level, everyone in an organization ultimately shares the same overarching goals, whether that’s revenue growth, profitability, risk reduction, or another strategic objective important to senior management. When teams have conflicting objectives, it can be helpful to look higher up in the organization to identify a leader who oversees common goals across the different teams.

Once you’ve pinpointed the closest shared goal among the teams you’re trying to align, take the time to understand why these teams developed different objectives in the first place. This misalignment could stem from various factors, such as a lack of resources on one team, inconsistent information being shared across the organization, individuals prioritizing their own interests over the broader goals of the company, etc. I would also be open to the idea that you may be focused on the wrong objectives, in which case you may need to adjust how you're approaching the project.

After identifying the root cause of the misalignment, work to isolate the issue and develop a solution that enables the different teams involved to achieve collective goals. For instance, if another team lacks the resources to support a key initiative you’re leading, you could collaborate with them to find alternative approaches or help them request additional resources. The best solution will depend on the specific nature of the problem and the available options at the time.

When navigating conflicting objectives, it’s important to keep an open mind, assume good intent unless proven otherwise, and sincerely work with others to explore win-win solutions. While most people value colleagues who seek cooperative outcomes, you may occasionally encounter someone more focused on their own interests than those of the organization. In such cases, I would look for assistance. You may need to escalate the issue, objectively explain the situation, and enlist support from other teams and leadership to find a path forward that achieves the best outcomes for everyone.

Different teams may have different goals, but at the end of the day, all of those goals are in support of larger business goals. Interdisciplinary project goals should ladder up to those larger business goals, and influence should come from moving the needle on those larger business goals. 

If people are not aligned on the same objectives for an interdisciplinary project, then it’s important to first take a step back to align on common objectives. 

The easiest way to influence heterogeneous goals is to show how action A for goal A would provide a positive impact on action B and goal B.

In the end, everyone has the same goal: increase company revenue / margins / stakeholder value.

But depending on how these goals are set, you might have a long way to go before succeeding. So what would a PMM do?

• Identify your target goal

• identify the target audience and persona

• define their jobs-to-be-done

• tailor your positioning and messaging to fit the needs of your target audience

• SUCCESS

Influencing other departments is a key skill within a Product Marketer's portfolio, and we're lucky our bread and butter positions us in a way that makes it doable for us.

TL;DR: understand what your counterpart might get out of your request for their own benefit, and use it "against" them.