On collecting ideas from internal stakeholders
One of the biggest facets of my job is “managing stakeholders”. Users, of course, are stakeholders. As are partners, vendors, etc. But for this article, I want to focus exclusively on internal stakeholders. Bloggins in marketing. Jafari in accounting. Gomez in design.
What does stakeholder management actually entail? For me, it breaks down into 4 things:
Ensure that everyone understands the WHY behind a project
Why do we think this is a problem for our users and our business?
Why do we think now is the time to solve it?
By the way, you should always start with why.
Ensure that everyone understands their role in helping solve the problem. Are they to be consulted? Informed? Responsible for building the solution?
Set expectations on what stakeholders can expect—and more importantly, should NOT expect—the solution to deliver.
This, by the way, is a very tricky thing to do. Jeff Patton describes the concept of “shared understanding” better than anyone. When everyone has a different idea in their head of what the feature will look like and how it will work, most people are going to be disappointed when they see the result.
Setting expectations on timelines and deliverables is also important here, especially when managing “up”.
Ensure that those who feel that they have something to contribute to the solution have their voices heard.
You don’t really have to do this (I mean, you don’t really have to do anything!) and I have been known to be a very collaborative PM, sometimes to a fault. My reasoning here is that the company is full of experts on our users, their problems, and our abilities to solve them, so why not collect all the data you can get before deciding on a certain path?
In this post, I want to focus exclusively on #4.
The worst thing you can do for getting internal stakeholder input is to call a meeting and have everyone sit around a table and talk about their ideas. In these situations, people are usually just waiting for their turn to speak. Introverts and those who are reluctant to speak up are at a disadvantage. One or two people can dominate the conversation. Someone might say something, and then everyone goes down that one path (in the interest of “building on that idea”) meaning a whole bunch of other really good ideas remain unsaid.
There are a few alternatives that I use over and over again because I find them so helpful. Let’s go through them one by one.
Send a survey
No need to get fancy here at all. Open text responses are probably best (as opposed to multiple choice, etc.). I use Google Surveys because it’s free, quick, and easy to throw one together.
Make sure you set context at the top of the survey (and again in the email or slack message you use to share the link). Something like:
“Hey guys! As you may have heard, our team is going to be tackling X this quarter. But we NEED YOUR HELP! Please take 10 minutes to thoughtfully fill out the survey below before end-of-day Friday. Feel free to join the #slack-channel if you’re interested in keeping up with our progress. Thank you!!”
Example questions include:
Feature X is meant to enable our users to solve Problem Y. How do you think our users are solving this problem today?
What do you think a good solution will entail?
Is there anything that you want the team to be cognizant of as we build this feature?
Are there any other apps that we should look at because they solve this problem really well?
Any other thoughts you want to share with us?
Print out a worksheet
Yep. Like back in elementary school. A printed out worksheet is similar to a survey, but has some key benefits.
You can ask people to draw a picture if it helps them express their thoughts.
You will get a different kind of engagement by walking over to someone’s desk and handing them a worksheet. People get excited when you get them to fill out worksheets. It reminds them of their childhood.
Of course, there are a few drawbacks as well, including the fact that worksheets are not ‘remote-friendly’ (unless you tell people to print and then scan them, which...well...don’t do that). Another drawback is that you might end up spending some time typing up worksheet responses anyway to use in specs, decks, and designs.
Use a digital sticky board
This method, used together with the next method, has been my favourite these days. Sticky-note workshops can be a very effective way of brainstorming. They level the playing field more than the ‘wait for people to speak up in a meeting’ approach and are an awesome way of getting group energy up. But these days, it’s so rare to have everyone co-located and available at the same time for a workshop.
So I prefer to set up a ‘board’ using a tool like TeamRetro and sharing the link out (note: TeamRetro isn’t exactly meant to be used this way, but I find it works really well). Users can easily create cards or sticky notes in each column that I’ve pre-defined, without seeing other peoples’ answers (this helps them stay focused on their own ideas rather than getting sidetracked by others’). Then, we can reveal the cards (TeamRetro even auto-clusters them for you, although it doesn’t always get this right) and focus more of our time on the discussion of themes that arise, rather than the individual ideas themselves. Some of the other great features in TeamRetro are being able to ‘vote’ on themes and setting a timer to ensure that we keep to time. Another great remote brainstorming tool is Mural. It’s more open-ended than TeamRetro and super great for visual learners like myself.
Provide homework before the meeting
Any time you ask people to brainstorm in a meeting, you are putting them on the spot. It’s unfair and unrealistic to expect people to put their best ideas forward when you just introduced the problem to them five minutes ago. And even if they have given this area a lot of thought, they won’t necessarily be able to remember all of their ideas during the course of your meeting.
This is why it’s so important to send homework in advance. Give people time to think!! To digest! To put the thought in their subconscious and allow it to dance there! Send them the worksheet, the survey, the digital sticky board a week in advance. Follow up with reminders throughout the week, and reach out to people personally if you need to.
By collecting stakeholder input asynchronously and individually you allow:
Everyone to work on ‘their own time’ rather than your time.
People to be more thoughtful in their responses.
Those who aren’t comfortable speaking up in a group setting to participate on equal footing everyone else.
Thoughts to be written down rather than hoping they’ve been heard.
Time spent in an actual meeting on DISCUSSION of the points that you collected rather than on the collection of ideas itself.
So there you have it. The next time you are tempted to put a meeting on the calendar to collect ideas or feedback on a project, consider sending homework out in advance using any of the tools listed above. I think you’ll find it’ll make managing your stakeholders easier.