How do stakeholders earn trust in PM:stakeholder collaboration?

The last two ROIs explored how PMs need to earn and extend trust with stakeholders in collaboration. Today, we shift to the stakeholder / exec side of the deal.

Recall that stakeholders end of the “empowerment deal” is creating (bounded) autonomy. That is, they don’t prescribe solutions to the product team, but rather assign objectives and outcomes, which the product team then takes on accountability for driving, with freedom to figure out the solution(s) that delight customers and work for the business.

What do stakeholders need to do to earn trust from PMs, and the product team, in their collaboration?

Stakeholders need to…

(1) Insist on strong thinking, not any one solution—especially their pet project solution. They must ensure the PM’s thinking is strong. If stakeholders disagree with the thinking, they’ll for sure disagree with the results of the thinking (the solution).

(2) Don't crush partially formed ideas when they’ve been invited into a creative process. Execs can have sharp elbows, even without meaning to. It’s a vulnerable act for a PM to bring partially-formed ideas to an exec and reveal creative work in process.

(3) Ask PMs, and themselves: “what’s your level of confidence in X? how did you get there?”

(4) Execs often forget that just as PMs can be biased…so are execs. Execs usually are less exposed to the real data / users / customers than PMs are. So execs, ask yourself: “how informed is my gut?” You may be reacting to recency bias and/or tiny samples from the one investor or angry customer that got your attention in the last week.

(5) Demonstrate commitment to coaching/developing people. Great products come from great people, and great people are developed. If you want a strong product org, this is job 1 for every manager.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at how execs/stakeholders extend trust in their ongoing collaboration with product.