Stakeholder Management FAQs

What is a stakeholder, and why is stakeholder engagement important in product management?

A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in the product and shows interest in it. This includes both internal and external parties. The former might involve marketing, sales, and support. The latter includes users and customers. In these FAQs, I focus on internal business stakeholders.

Effective stakeholder engagement is essential because product success depends greatly on stakeholder support and collaboration. There are two reasons for this. First, you usually need the expertise of stakeholders to make effective product decisions, especially high-impact ones like choosing the right marketing and sales channels. Second, some stakeholders might have to actively contribute to the product and create, for instance, the marketing strategy and the marketing collateral. In sum, effectively engaging the stakeholders will ensure that the product can be successfully provided, supported, and monetised.

For more advice, read the article Stakeholder Management Tips for Product People.

How can I engage the right stakeholders?

To focus your stakeholder management effort, identify your key stakeholders—those individuals whose expertise and help you need to achieve product success. This is particularly helpful when you are faced with a large group of stakeholders, which is not uncommon in bigger companies.

A handy stakeholder analysis tool is the power-interest grid, originally created by Mendelow and further developed by Ackermann and Eden. As its name suggests, the grid analyses the stakeholders by considering their power and interest; it assumes that people take a low or high interest in a product and have low or high power. This results in four stakeholder groups: players, subjects, context setters, and crowd, as Figure 1 below shows.

Figure 1: Power Interest Grid

The players in Figure 1 are your key stakeholders: These are the individuals with whom you should closely collaborate and who you should include in important product decisions. Involve them in creating and evolving a product strategy and in building and updating the product roadmap. Invite them to product strategy workshops and sprint review meetings so they can share their perspectives and knowledge and have a complete picture of what’s happening with the product. Additionally, keep the group of key stakeholders stable so that the individuals support the product for an extended period—months and years rather than days and weeks.

While the players deserve most of your attention, don’t forget to engage the other three groups in Figure 1.

• Crowd: You might want to keep the individuals informed, for instance, by updating them on important developments in the form of a newsletter. You
• Subjects: You might want to invite them to bigger, quarterly review meetings and encourage them to share their feedback.
• Context Setters: As these are often senior stakeholders, like head of development and head of sales, you might want to consult them in the form of one-on-one meetings, if possible, and/or invite them to bigger review meetings.

For more information, refer to the article Getting Stakeholder Engagement Right.

What are some key tips for effective stakeholder management?

• Focus on the key stakeholders: Identify and prioritise the small set of stakeholders whose buy-in is crucial for product success.
• Ensure continuity: Form a stable group for long-term collaboration, set clear roles, and collaboratively define goals. Consider forming an extended product team with key stakeholders as members.
• Build trust: Practice empathy and active listening, be transparent, and involve stakeholders in decision-making. Consider forming an extended product team with key stakeholders as team members.
• Involve the key stakeholders in important product decisions: Attentively listen to their suggestions, but don’t make the mistake of saying yes to every idea and request. Build agreement but make sure that the right product decisions are made. Set product-related goals collaboratively.
• Hold people accountable and offer clear feedback: If stakeholders have agreed to contribute to meeting a product goal, expect that they will deliver on their commitment. If that’s not the case, offer helpful feedback. Don’t shy away from difficult conversations and conflicts.
• Don’t let stakeholders dictate product features: While you should value the views and feedback of the stakeholders, don’t allow them to make the product decisions. It’s your job as the product manager to ensure that the product creates as much value as possible for the users and customers and the business as a whole.

More advice is available in the articles Stakeholder Management Tips for Product People, How to Offer Constructive Feedback, Making Effective Product Decisions, and How to Leverage Conflict in Product Management.

How do I secure stakeholder buy-in?

• Involve the right stakeholders early: Invite the key stakeholders to collaborative workshops for joint decision-making to ensure alignment and shared ownership. Consider co-creating the product strategy and product roadmap.
• Empathise: Attentively listen to the stakeholders with the intention to understand. Try to understand their underlying interests and goals. Appreciate their contributions even if you don’t find them helpful or you disagree with them. This makes people feel appreciated, and it makes it more likely that they will support a decision.
• Foster collaborative decision-making: Use a facilitator, for example, a Scrum Master or agile coach, to ensure all voices are heard and agree on ground rules for group discussions. Don’t allow individuals to dominate and tell you what to do. Focus on what is best for the users and customers and the entire business.
• Communicate regularly: Keep all stakeholder groups updated on key decisions and progress. Invite the key stakeholders to joint meetings, for example, product strategy workshops and sprint reviews.

You can find more information in the articles Maximising Stakeholder Buy-in to Product Strategy and Product Roadmap, Empathy in Product Management, Making Effective Product Decisions, and Tips for Effective Product Strategy Reviews.

What are best practices for saying "No" to stakeholders?

• Don’t feel bad about saying no: Saying yes to every request leads to poor user experience and weak products. Saying no is part of being a responsible product manager.
• Empathise first: Listen to stakeholder concerns with an open mind and understand their motivations before declining a request.
• Offer clear reasoning: Explain the rationale (e.g., alignment with strategy, resource limitations) in a respectful, honest way.
• Engage in transparent decision-making: Use group meetings like a product strategy workshop to discuss requests openly, avoid personal negotiations that bypass the process.
• Strengthen your leadership: If you lack the authority to say no, work on boosting your product leadership power.

For more advice, read the articles 5 Tips for Saying No to Stakeholders and How to Strengthen Your Empowerment.

How can I collect effective feedback from stakeholders on product features?

• Demo or release the product (increment): Give stakeholders the opportunity to see the product or an early version in action rather than asking them what they want from it. Stakeholders often don’t fully realise what’s possible and feasible and what they really need before they see or try out an initial product version.
• Encourage active feedback: Ask open-ended questions and seek detailed opinions. Keep an open mind but don’t say yes to every request. Use the current product goal to decide if it should be taken on board or declined.
• Discuss progress transparently: Prefer group discussions over several one-on-one meetings. For example, ask the stakeholders to attend the sprint review meeting to understand the progress and share their views. Use artefacts like release burndown charts to make the progress transparent.

Find more information in the article Sprint Review Tips for Product People.

Should stakeholders be on the product team?

Inviting the key stakeholders to become product team members and forming an extended product team can offer the following four benefits.

• Better Collaboration: Extended product teams foster strong cross-functional collaboration, break down cross-departmental barriers, and help remove silos.
• Better Alignment: Having stakeholders as permanent team members helps build mutual trust, creates a shared understanding, improves alignment, and brings clarity to what should and can be achieved.
• Better Decisions: Leveraging the collective wisdom of the group helps you come up with more creative solutions compared to talking to individual stakeholders.
• Better Buy-in: The individuals actively contribute to decisions, participate in a collaborative decision-making process, and are therefore more likely to support the product strategy and product roadmap.

However, adding stakeholders to the product team also has its challenges. Reaching agreements in a larger, more diverse team can be more difficult and time-consuming. Additionally, senior stakeholders might expect that they will make the key decisions, not the entire team. Finally, the stakeholders might struggle to dedicate enough time to attend product team meetings and carry out the necessary work.

Whether having the stakeholders on the product team is right for you will depend on the individuals and organisation, as well as the product. The more innovative a product is, the more it tends to benefit from close stakeholder collaboration. If you decide to include the stakeholders, make sure that you have an experienced facilitator or coach who supports you and helps with forming an effective extended product team.

For more information, read the article Should Stakeholders Be on the Product Team?

What pitfalls should I avoid in stakeholder engagement?

• Trying to please everyone: Leads to products with a poor value proposition and user experience.
• Ignoring key stakeholders: Can result in a lack of buy-in and resistance to the direction you want to take the product in.
• Suppressing conflicts: Can lead to suboptimal decisions and mistrust, frustration, and resentment.
• Poor communication: Failing to keep people informed and involved weakens support and trust and leads to misunderstanding and misalignment.
• Lack of accountability: Not holding stakeholders to their commitments or tolerating inappropriate behaviour undermines collaboration.