Skip to main content
Stakeholder management sounds like corporate bureaucracy. In practice, it’s one of the most important skills a PM has - because without it, the best discovery work in the world gets overridden by whoever shouts loudest in the leadership meeting 🤝

​
Who stakeholders are

Stakeholders are anyone with a legitimate interest in what your product does: executives, sales, customer success, marketing, legal, finance, engineering leadership. They all have opinions, constraints, and skin in the game. Some have authority over your roadmap whether you like it or not. The mistake is treating them as obstacles. The better frame: they have information and context you need, and they need to trust you before they’ll give you room to work.

​
The core job

Stakeholder management is fundamentally about two things: Building trust - stakeholders who trust you give you autonomy. Stakeholders who don’t will fill the vacuum with requests, mandates, and HiPPO decisions. Trust comes from transparency, consistency, and delivering on what you say you’ll do. Managing expectations - surprises are the enemy. A stakeholder who hears about a missed deadline from their CEO before they hear it from you will never fully trust you again. Over-communicate, especially when things aren’t going well 💡

​
Practical habits

  • Regular updates, not just crisis comms - a brief weekly or fortnightly written update keeps stakeholders informed without requiring meetings
  • Involve them early - sharing a problem you’re working on before you have a solution invites input rather than resistance
  • Understand their goals - a sales leader asking for a specific feature usually has an underlying concern (closing a deal, reducing churn). Address the concern, not just the request
  • Say no with a reason and an alternative - “we’re not doing that because we’re focused on X, but here’s how we’ll address your underlying need” lands better than a flat no

​
The HiPPO problem

The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion is a real force. When an executive has a strong view on what should be built, most teams default to building it. The antidote is evidence - not arguments. Data from users, results from tests, and a clear connection to agreed outcomes are the only things that reliably shift strongly held opinions 🙌 Marty Cagan is blunt about this in Empowered - if your team is just executing stakeholder requests, you’re not a product team, you’re a feature factory. Lesson learned: the PMs I’ve seen struggle most with stakeholders were the ones who avoided the hard conversations. The ones who thrived treated every stakeholder as a relationship to invest in, not a problem to manage.