PM series: Stakeholder management
Partnering with your stakeholders to maximize product outcomes
When I moved to product management, it was easy to gel with the engineering team as I was an engineer earlier. In my first PM stint, my fellow PMs were non engineers and my engineering head immediately connected with me, because we spoke the same language - we both knew what was feasible, what timelines made sense, how to be data backed and logical.
Apart from engineering, I had to interface with the customer support team, and the PMs and EMs from the broader division - together we owned the Bing search product. My specific product was Bing Webmaster Tools. I barely had 3 teams I needed to inerface with. But even with just a few teams to interface with, stakeholder management was important. I had to ensure my peer PMs don’t feel threatened because I connected so easily with engineering - I even gave my word that I wouldn’t run any scripts which they were not comfortable running and which gave me an data advantage when I spoke to leaders. I realised I shouldn’t have to leverage my unfair engineering advantage to ship products and had to earn my engineering team’s time. This one decision alone earned the trust of my team mates who collaborated well with me and we operated as one product team.