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How to work effectively with stakeholders

Almost every product has a group of people who don’t build or use the product but impact, or are impacted by the product. We usually refer to these folks as stakeholders and they often have more influence on the success of your product than you might expect. This week, we’re sharing some tips and advice on how you can manage your relationship with stakeholders without making it feel like you’re managing the stakeholders themselves.

Meanwhile, in product news, Google added tabs to Docs, Driver auto generates docs that could use tabs, Syncly organizes your customer feedback, and Jira now lets you name issues what you really call them.

Relationships matter: The art of stakeholder management. A typical product team has numerous stakeholders and dependencies to worry about. In addition, the success of your product often hinges on effectively understanding and addressing the needs and concerns of those various stakeholders. Kasey Fu shares reasons why stakeholder management is important for product managers, and how to become better at doing it.

Keeping the peace: How to manage all your product stakeholders. One of the most fun, and most challenging, elements in product management is working with a range of interdisciplinary stakeholders. You have to communicate with multiple stakeholders on any given day, so you need to regularly articulate thoughts to various types of stakeholders. It doesn’t help that every stakeholder has a unique way of thinking, and as such, contributes something unique to the product strategy. Ademola Ajijola reviews the various types of stakeholders and explains how to successfully work with those different types.

Navigating stakeholder dynamics in product management. Managing stakeholder relationships is one of the most critical and nuanced aspects of the role of product manager. Whether you’re a seasoned product leader or still sharpening your skills, mastering stakeholder dynamics requires an understanding of influence, expectation management, and alignment across teams and departments. Jeremy Horn describes some key stakeholder dynamics and shares some practical tips for navigating those dynamics.

Deep-Dive – Mastering stakeholder management for product leaders. As a product manager or leader, your ability to manage stakeholder relationships is as critical as your strategy and execution skills. In fact, those relationships have a real chance to make or break a project whether it’s a new product launch, product strategy planning process, or any other project your product team is working on. Mike Belsito explains how to turn challenging interactions into productive dialogues and build stronger, more successful products through enhanced stakeholder management.

Strategies for Keeping Your Stakeholders Educated When Building Internal Products. When you're building internal products as a Product Manager -- there are all sorts of internal stakeholders to not just keep informed, but also educated. Just as important as it is to keep your customers educated on your products when building for external customers -- the same is true for internal stakeholders when you're building internal products. In this video, Product Collective Co-Founder, Mike Belsito, goes over strategies on how to do this best -- zooming in on insights from a keynote talk that was given by Vanathy Lakshmi, a product leader who's been responsible for building multiple internal products.

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Technical Debt

Now that we’re in “spooky szn”, I’m going to mention two words that bring so many of us nightmares that will take years to recover from.

Technical Debt.

I know, I know… shivers down the spine, right?

Here's the deal: technical debt isn't just an engineering problem. It's a product problem, a business problem, and if left unchecked, it can become your biggest problem as a product leader.

Every time you push for that quick fix to meet a deadline, or when you prioritize a new feature over refactoring, you're essentially taking out a loan on your product's future. And just like financial debt, technical debt compounds over time.

But here's where it gets tricky. In the world of digital transformation, speed is king. We're all racing to innovate, to beat the competition, to be the next big thing. And sometimes, that means making trade-offs. But how do we balance the need for rapid innovation with long-term sustainability?

The key is to make technical debt visible and part of your strategic planning. It's not enough to leave it to the engineering team to deal with. As product leaders, we need to understand the implications of technical debt on our product roadmap, our team's velocity, and our ability to adapt to market changes.

The solution isn't to stop innovating or to halt all development until you've paid off every bit of technical debt. Instead, it's about finding a balance. Prioritize high-impact areas where technical debt is most disruptive. Use agile methodologies to make incremental improvements. And most importantly, foster a culture where addressing technical debt is seen as a crucial part of product development, not a necessary evil.

Remember, as product leaders, our job is to build products that last. And sometimes, that means taking a step back to clean house before we can move forward. Your future self (and your engineering team) will thank you for it.

Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.