Persuading Your Stakeholders

Persuade your stakeholders. But how?

Leadership is unfamiliar with the idea of seeing market opportunities from the perspective of people. Stakeholders are often trapped in the cycle of feature improvement.

Here are some tips and places to learn more.

Tips for persuading stakeholders

We are a solutions culture. Our first impulse is to come up with ways to fix things. Dropping this impulse for a moment, taking time to listen deeply, is the way to develop trust. With stakeholders, this means learning how they think, building your understanding of their concerns, and making them feel heard. Over time, you will have built their trust, which they will extend to you.

You can also develop trusting relationships with your peers at work. You can develop trust with customers. And best of all, you can develop trust with people who you’d never thought of before. With all this trust, with this deep knowledge, you can then turn on your fixing-things ideas.

9 Barriers to “Yes” – Problem Space Research

Indi Young, 8-Aug-20

Organizations are starving for knowledge, and they think everything is fine

3 Ways to Change Orgs that Loathe Wasting Time

Indi Young, 14-May-18

In the tech world, as well as in other industries (like science), there is an overriding push to speed up discovery. In business, the root cause is often...

Finding Budget

Indi Young, 8-Aug-20

Every few weeks I create an estimate for a potential client’s problem space research study. Sometimes they want a ballpark...

Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders

by Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Appel

I know Bruce and Melissa and LOVE what they have to say in their book! Solid ideas based on solid experience.

Show Stakeholders the Gaps in how your org currently learns
(Vocabulary, Metrics, Methods)

Define Value Beyond “faster-easier-efficient-scalable”

Indi Young - 21-Jul-23

Why does the tech world only think of value in these terms?

In product and service roles, we talk about value a lot. In the tech world, hardly anyone questions what value is.

Your Org’s Strategic Direction Is Based on Research

Indi Young, Kunyi Mangalam - 22-May-23

Research is knowledge-creation. Organizations need knowledge and create it in a variety of ways, from pricing models to audits, customer feedback to employee reviews, or competitor analysis to brand awareness.

Why Organizations Avoid Qualitative Research

Indi Young - 6-Aug-20

Because the business world shuns uncertainty, quantitative data insights get twisted so that the conclusions sound like they were deduced, and their validity unimpeachable.

Lead Your Org in a Shift to people's context (purpose)

compares organization's purpose to people's purpose. Column 1 says, "results of tests, comparisons of the solution, what your team wants to know, what your org hopes to achieve within the year, and what stakeholders ask you to do because it's the process." Column 2 contains, "what a person is trying to make progress toward or accomplish, such as a plan, decision, preparing, doing." Column 2 continues, "while employing 'tools' to accomplish the purpose such as mental tools, social tools, manual tools, mechanical tools, and digital tools (maybe yours)."

A Powerful Lens: People’s Purpose

Indi Young - 29-Jan-21

Let’s say you’re working for an apparel & shoes brand that wants to reduce returns (a.k.a. help customers make the right purchase the first time). You have data about which items get returned more frequently...

Harness Mental Models To Create Strategic Alignment

Joana de Quintanilha - 24-Jun-24

Ask around your org to see if you have a subscription to Forrester Reports

"Make sure you set up a lunch meeting with one of the stakeholders. And keep building that relationship over time."

"Diagrams, colors & patterns catch eyes. People don't like looking at boring words, and they shut down cognitively when they're feeling overwhelmed by too much information. I think of it like teaching kindergarteners."

--E. Tae

Join the Indiyoung Slack Workspace #ongoing-discussion channel to ask for advice about your stakeholders and share ideas.

Request Slack Access