🤝 Stakeholder Management
Product managers operate without direct authority over most of the people they need to influence. Stakeholder management is the art of aligning engineering, design, sales, marketing, executive leadership, and customers around a shared product vision. It requires understanding each stakeholder's incentives, communication preferences, and decision-making frameworks.
Stakeholder Mapping
High Power, High Interest
Manage closely — executives, key customers, engineering leads
High Power, Low Interest
Keep satisfied — CFO, board members, regulatory bodies
Low Power, High Interest
Keep informed — team members, users, domain experts
Low Power, Low Interest
Monitor — peripheral teams, industry observers
Real-World Example
When launching new healthcare product categories, aligning a 52-member team required different communication strategies: engineering needed technical feasibility analysis, sales needed revenue projections, marketing needed positioning clarity, and leadership needed ROI timelines. A single all-hands presentation would not have worked.