Stakeholders with Low Interest and Low Influence

The group of stakeholders with low interest and low influence are those on whom you want to spend the least of your time as a Product Owner. This group of people has low interest in your product and/or gains little to no benefit from your product’s success. In addition, they have low influence over you, your team, and/or your product or service. The stakeholder management strategy for this group of stakeholders is therefore to monitor.

The monitoring strategy is not the same as ignoring them, though! You do want to keep an eye on this group and regularly evaluate whether there have been any changes. People from this group may move to one of the other stakeholder groups. For example, they may get more influence over or interest in your product due to a new job or position in the organization. When they move to another area of the stakeholder map, they might become more important to you and will need to be managed differently. Also consider how a stakeholder’s interest and involvement might change over time, for example, when you’re getting closer to a new market release, a project deadline or milestone, or when an audit (e.g., security, risk, compliance) is coming up.

Because this stakeholder group has low interest and low influence, limit the time spent on this group. Choose communication solutions and channels that you are already using for stakeholders in the other areas of the stakeholder map. This saves you time and helps you stay efficient and effective.

Stakeholders with Low Interest and High Influence

As a Product Owner, you will probably also want to spend relatively little time on the group of stakeholders with low interest and high influence. This stakeholder group does not have much interest in your product, not in a positive or negative sense. However, this group of stakeholders does have a lot of influence. With this influence, they may also have a lot of influence over you, your team, and your product or service. The stakeholder management strategy for this group of stakeholders is therefore to keep them satisfied.

If this group of stakeholders is satisfied with the results that are relevant to them, you will usually not hear from them or see them around. They are often interested in the effect that your product or service has on their own department, team, or business unit. They may be affected by the product to some extent, yet they do not care much about the product itself. They have little interest in the product’s features, functions, and capabilities. However, when things go wrong, these stakeholders often know where to find you. To effectively manage this group of stakeholders, you must primarily keep them informed about the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that are relevant to them. Therefore, do not tell these stakeholders how great your product is or what new features you have made; rather, tell them what positive effect your product has on the metrics that are important to them. In other words, offer the chief financial officer insight into the development of costs, the total cost of ownership, and return on investment for the product; offer the chief marketing officer insight into the success of the marketing campaigns and increase in organizational brand awareness; and offer the chief operating officer insight into how your new developments improve efficiency and reduce the number of manual actions and/or disruptions on operations.

Many Product Owners experience this keep-satisfied stakeholder group as a difficult one to engage with. And to be fair, it is not always easy! To manage this group effectively, it is helpful to have some political skills to navigate your interactions with them. You should realize that this group of people can also help you to be more effective as a Product Owner and to increase your authority. If you keep these people satisfied, you create space for yourself to be more entrepreneurial. This does not mean that you must do everything they ask you to do. If you did that, you probably wouldn’t deliver the most value for customers, users, and the organization. What it does mean is that you must build a strong relationship with them. Put yourself in their shoes. Understand their motives. Get to know their interests. Understand what they want and need to achieve and what their goals are. Try to understand what they are held accountable for. With these insights, you can inform, help, manage, and influence them more effectively.

Stakeholders with High Interest and Low Influence

Sometimes referred to as “friends of the show,” stakeholders with high interest and low influence could also hold an opposing attitude. Regardless of their interest in what happens, they have relatively low influence to intervene or to change things.

You want to keep these stakeholders informed of new developments, and you want them to be sufficiently involved in the development of the product. This quadrant regularly has users, delegations of users, and customers.

This group cares that your product is successful, of high quality, and is usable and valuable, but they generally cannot make important decisions, interfere with your plans, or change things around. Consequently, they typically rely on formal processes, procedures, and/or meetings, such as escalations or complaints, to change things around to their benefit. The stakeholder management strategy for this group is to inform (proactively).

You want to keep these stakeholders well informed of any new developments, and you want them to be sufficiently involved in the development and delivery of the product or service. It is typically in this group where Product Owners plot their product’s users, user delegations, or user committees, as well as customers or customer panels.

What usually works well for this stakeholder group is to inform them regularly. In addition to communicating through newsletters, blogs, and videos, you can involve (some of) these stakeholders in Sprint Reviews, additional product demos, user tests, training, and brainstorming sessions. Regardless of the tools and channels you use, ensure that you communicate with this group proactively and schedule recurring appointments. By scheduling the interaction periodically, you ensure that the interaction and feedback take place at times that suit you and your team, thus preventing a group of stakeholders with little influence from determining your agenda.

Stakeholders with High Interest and High Influence

The last group of stakeholders, the ones who have a lot of interest and a lot of influence, are of course the most important group of stakeholders to you as a Product Owner. These stakeholders not only have a lot of interest in the success of the product but also have a lot of influence to help you to be successful. The stakeholder management strategy for this group of stakeholders is to actively collaborate.

Keep these stakeholders very well informed. You need to actively involve them and ensure that they know what is going on, at least on a strategic level, but also including some tactics. Give them a voice regarding your product’s future direction, solicit their help in deciding on the next steps, and include them in strategic decision making. For example, you actively collaborate with these stakeholders on the product vision, product strategy, product roadmap, and ordering of the Product Backlog. Together with these stakeholders, you determine what is important and what is not. Together with these people, you decide how to maximize value, how to deal with risks, and what goals and delivery dates (or deadlines) to set.

Building strong relationships with these stakeholders is crucial to your success and to theirs. It is important to gain their trust and support. This group has a lot of hierarchical influence within the organization. And with this formal influence, they can help you to be the entrepreneur you want to be. Try to turn them into your ambassadors. Building strong relationships will prove to be very valuable, especially when you encounter setbacks, difficult stakeholders, conflicting interests, or stormy weather. Do you want to be able to effectively say no to most of your stakeholders? Do you want your decisions to be supported? Do you want to be backed up by influential stakeholders? Then make sure these stakeholders are your ambassadors!

Because this group is your most important stakeholder group, you will spend most of your time engaging with them. Therefore, you should be certain of whom you put in this area of the stakeholder map. A common mistake by Product Owners is to put too many stakeholders in this area. The more key stakeholders you have, the busier you will be. It is not impossible or unthinkable that you have many stakeholders with a lot of interest and a lot of influence. If that is the case in your situation, then force yourself to make a top three to five selections. Ask a Scrum Master or Agile Coach to help you in this selection. Also, validate the stakeholder map with those key stakeholders and see what they think about it. Start to work intensively together with these three to five key stakeholders on your product vision and strategy. Involve the other stakeholders with high interest and high influence in other areas, such as defining the roadmap or Product Backlog.

Regarding customers, consumers, and the product’s users, it goes without saying that this group is a key group of stakeholders. Ultimately, you are building a product to solve a problem or fulfill a need for them. So where would you plot your customers and users in the stakeholder map? As we described in the high interest, low influence section earlier, we often plot our customers, consumers, and users in that area. This might seem strange, as they are some of the key beneficiaries of the product.

However, imagine that your product has 50,000 customers or users. In such cases, it is likely impossible to engage with all of them individually. What often happens is that you will approach customers and users as your key stakeholders, but through the means of the high interest, low influence stakeholder management strategy. There are solutions such as interviews, test sessions, focus groups that allow for more interaction, which is often done through a small selection of your customers and users.

There are also situations (often in a B2B context) where a few customers are in the high interest, high influence area. This is often the case for companies who have one big client and a bunch of smaller ones. We’ve seen this situation quite often; the big client has a lot of influence, and all the little ones need to adapt. In this scenario, the big client would be plotted in the actively collaborate part of the stakeholder map.

As you move forward on your journey to become an entrepreneurial Product Owner, you will discover you have some weaknesses. There are some things you may not know yet. Perhaps you know too little about marketing, sales, pricing, or technology to drive your product forward across all areas. If that’s the case, then keep this in mind: Utilize others for the weaknesses that you have. To do so, ensure that you start to plot stakeholders who can support your weakness in the actively collaborate part of your stakeholder map.

Figure 29.2 captures the different strategies. As an alternative to the stakeholder map as a square, you could visualize the stakeholder map as a circle, connecting the different stakeholder types to the stakeholder management strategies. By applying the right strategy to the right group of stakeholders, you should become more effective at stakeholder management and potentially grow your authority as a Product Owner or product manager.

Involvement or Engagement

The stakeholder radar, as shown in Figure 29.3, consists of four rings that reflect the level of engagement or involvement that the stakeholder has. Some stakeholders may be only slightly aware of your product or service. Like the low interest, low influence quadrant in the stakeholder map, you mainly want to keep an eye on these stakeholders in case they move to another circle. Large groups of “aware” stakeholders can also be of interest to you, as they might represent a form of critical mass.

Other stakeholders may be somewhat more involved with the product or service, perhaps because they supply you with people, time, funding, or materials. For a typical business-to-consumer (B2C) product, you may find user presentations in this circle. Supply chain or distribution, marketing, sales, and operations are typically found here, but for a completely new product, they should probably be more engaged.

Some people are engaged in the product. They may take an active role, for example, by joining demos or Sprint Reviews. Perhaps they help you in the process. Perhaps they offer knowledge, feedback, or time. They are slightly less influential than those in the center ring. Think of sponsors, power users, and departments that depend on or are affected by your product.

Finally, in the center ring of the stakeholder radar, you will find the people who help you to define and set the direction for the product or service. Respect for your decisions comes from close collaboration with these stakeholders, not from having been appointed Product Owner. You must be aware of their attitude toward the product.

For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions.

—Scrum Guide 2020

Attitude

The stakeholder radar offers a second perspective on your stakeholders: their attitude toward the product, yourself, or your team. Their attitude is represented by the four quadrants in the stakeholder radar. These quadrants are more subjective than the four quadrants in the stakeholder map, so it may be useful to gauge some opinions among your team members and/or the stakeholders to learn about their attitudes.

There is always a group of people who don’t care too much about your product, which is the indifferent group. Hopefully, the people in this group are not in a position where they can influence the direction of the product, which could be very harmful. In most cases, these are people from other teams or other departments who don’t have a clear interest or stake in your product. You might find that some of these people are part of your team. These could be team members who have low motivation at that time. Taking the Visionary or Collaborator stance might help to light a spark for them. Doing the complex work that we often do, it helps a lot to have a focused team with a shared mission.

The next attitude is described as friendly. These people are your allies, your friendlies, your fans perhaps. You probably know who those fans or friends of the product are within your stakeholder group. These are the people who are supportive of your product, and you probably spent significant time on people in this segment. But do you focus on the people who are involved in the work? Directing the product’s future? Or only slightly aware of the product existing?

Then there is the group of critics. This group consists of people who haven’t made up their minds yet. They are still unsure whether to be in favor of your product or against it. They are significantly different from the group who are indifferent, though! The indifferent group doesn’t care. This group, however, does care, but they don’t yet know how to care. For the time being, they are therefore critical toward new ideas, goals, and work to be done in general. What will probably stand out about the folks in this group is that they often pose difficult questions, and they find facts and figures for you to analyze and respond to. When this group is in the outer rings (aware or somewhat involved), they might not express their feelings and doubts openly. As they become more active (engaged or directing), they will either openly express their disagreement or ask you some difficult questions in front of the whole stakeholder group. The closer they are to the center of the radar, the more paramount it is that you do an intervention to turn them into fans. Alternatively, you might deflect their potentially negative influence on the group by pairing them with a stakeholder who is supportive of your ideas. Here are a couple of additional tips for more effective collaboration with critics:

• Check whether the criticism is valid (e.g., a fair point), inaccurate, or a twisting of the truth.

• Learn about your critics: Who are they? What are their motivations and objectives? What are they doing? Is there any common ground between you?

• Take the conversation offline. Most issues are too complex for a public discussion.

• Meet your critics in person, regularly if you can. Keep the dialogue going.

• Answer their criticisms. Anticipate and be ready to answer their future criticisms too.

• Answer more calmly than your critics (rarely a challenge in my experience), but do not hesitate to affirm your points, views, and positive results as loudly as they do.

• As quickly as possible, get proactive on the issues they are raising. That might involve proactive PR work, roundtables, consultations, reports, events, even social media posts.

The last group of people is the opposed group. Although many of us dream about politics-free organizations and companies that are one big happy family with a shared passion and goal, practice is often different. We as Product Owners know better, right? There is always a group of unhappy people in an organization. This could be unhappiness with your product, service, resources, goals, or otherwise. Perhaps your product took away resources and people from their product. Perhaps your product changes the way they work. Perhaps people might, or fear they might, lose their jobs because of your product. Interacting, collaborating, or engaging with this opposed group may not always be fun and exciting. But you need to build good relationships with your opponents too. What is bothering them? What can you do to mitigate the pain they are experiencing? Who or what influences them? Here are some tips for better collaboration with opposed stakeholders:

• Don’t ignore them or their problem. Their issue isn’t going away by itself. It’s crucial to understand the opposition and address it. Otherwise, the opposition will intensify and become more difficult to deal with. If you need help, then ask friendlies for support. Keep the dialogue open, so you can learn as much as possible to resolve their concerns.

• Focus on business benefits and risks. Opposition often comes from misunderstandings and fear of change. Communicate the benefits of your work. Treat concerns as risks and collaborate with the opposed stakeholders on mitigation strategies. Include friendlies, opposed, and critical stakeholders in such efforts. Ensure that reports and updates provide detail to inform both supporters and opponents. Again, lacking transparency, information, and understanding often causes opponents to become opponents in the first place.

• Leverage supportive stakeholders. The benefits you provide to some stakeholders can create concerns for others. Ensure your sponsors are aware of any concerns so they can help counter roadblocks created by opposed stakeholders.

• Seek opportunities to support your concerned stakeholder. Understanding your stakeholder’s concerns can surface ideas for future projects that will provide benefits. Helping them build a business case for a follow-on project will help you preserve your relationship and further advance your business. It also demonstrates your ability to see the big picture in your business environment.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

—Sun Tzu

The stakeholder radar may function as a replacement of the stakeholder map or as an addition to it. Considering people’s level of engagement and their attitude toward you or your product may help to design an effective stakeholder management strategy. Once you have applied your stakeholder management strategy for some time, inspect and adapt the stakeholder map and stakeholder radar. Have you seen any evidence of stakeholders changing their mindset? What other strategies, tactics, and interventions can you experiment with? Can you use the help and support of your (friendly) stakeholders to work with the other (critics and opposed) stakeholders more effectively? Finally, don’t be afraid to ask people about their ideas, opinions, and perspectives. Imagine how disarming it would be if we could simply ask a stakeholder, “It feels like you are not very supportive of our product. What can I do to change that?”