The best way for product teams to build trust and get buy-in from stakeholders is to deliver their work on time, according to Mike Sobaski, director of product development at IoT hardware company Wyze.
However, sometimes, that’s easier said than done. So what’s the solution?
Milestones. Sobaski said that working toward communicated and agreed-upon milestones as opposed to working toward only the final launch helps the product team better hit targets and helps stakeholders plan around any uncertainty or delays in the process.
To gain a better understanding of how Sobaski goes about the process of building trust and getting buy-in from stakeholders, Built In Seattle caught up with him. He shared what additional strategies he’s found helpful in managing stakeholders’ expectations around how products should be prioritized.
Which stakeholders do you include in the product planning process, and what role do they play in informing the product strategy?
Before we officially start a project, we hold a product kickoff meeting, which includes contacts from nearly every team at the company: sales, hardware engineering, development, sourcing, marketing, operations, finance, support and commerce. During the meeting, the owning PM presents the product and gathers some early feedback and impressions from the key stakeholders. At the end of this meeting, we take the feedback into consideration and our leadership then makes the official decision to approve or reject the project.
What steps have you found to be particularly helpful in managing stakeholders and their expectations regarding how products or features are prioritized?
Bringing stakeholders in early and giving them a venue to formally voice their opinions has been incredibly helpful. Before we implemented this process, our internal teams didn’t have great visibility into our roadmap and therefore were unable to plan their work to support new products.
Additionally, we would get feature requests or other feedback too late in the development cycle that simply couldn’t be implemented without causing major delays or rework. Giving folks a venue early on lets them feel included in the process, extracts the key information needed before the project gets too far and then makes them better prepared to support the product.
The best way to build trust is to follow through on what you say you’re going to do.”
What steps have you taken to build trust with stakeholders?
The best way to build trust is to follow through on what you say you’re going to do. For the product team, that largely means being able to deliver products on time. However, that’s easier said than done. We’ve had several examples of missing our dates, which burned internal teams. To fix this, we now focus on the next milestone versus the final launch date. Breaking our development process down into shorter deliverables makes us better able to hit our dates and helps our stakeholders plan around any uncertainty.
