Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm David Pereira. Welcome to my channel. Today's episode I want to talk to you about something that bugs most of the product owners and product managers. How can you handle multiple stakeholders? I'm not gonna tell you how to avoid that. I'm gonna share some insights which will help you to overcome this challenge. It is a fact you will always have multiple stakeholders. It's also a fact they will always want more than you can deliver. But how you handle that will define how successful you can be. The first part I want to share with you is the understanding of who your stakeholders are. For example, many times, I did that already, product owners believe the stakeholders are the customers. And then they come to you and say I would like to implement this feature here. And instead of asking them why do you need that? Which evidence do you have that this is gonna solve the end-users problem? You will go and ask how can we implement this? What is needed? What are the requirements? These are wrong questions because stakeholders are not your customers. They are not your end-users. Many times they believe they are the end-users but they are not. And if they come to you and say I know exactly what my end-users need and I know them so you do as I say and we will rock together. Just run from this trap. This is a lie and it's a bullshit. You need to understand they are not the customers. But then if stakeholders block you from contacting the customers, who are stakeholders? Are they your enemies? Are they trying to protect the customers? They are not your enemies. They are your partners. Because if you're a product owner, product manager, let's be honest with each other, you don't have all the business knowledge you need to ensure successful results. You don't understand everything about market. You don't understand everything about legal aspects, data privacy and so on and so on. But the stakeholders do. So that's why you need to be close to them to build successful solutions that are also viable from the business perspective. They are your partners. You should partner with them to build relevant solutions. But don't treat them as your customer. You have to be very careful with the questions you ask. Many stakeholders treat everything as important and urgent. But you should be very careful because if you ask some questions like why is it important? Why is it urgent? They may try to convince you. But try to ask some more challenging questions. For example, what happens if we don't do that at all? What is the impact that it's going to generate in the business? Many times they will not have an answer for that because they don't know the impact. And you know why? They don't know because there's no impact. It's important and urgent only for them. And the other thing is be very careful with the wants of stakeholders. Because what they want might not be what the end-users need. And you have to understand with whom you are talking to. And then I come to the second point now which I call is alignment versus satisfaction. For a long time in my career I tried to satisfy most of the stakeholders. And I failed dramatically. Because it seemed possible to satisfy all of them. There are guys from finance, accounting and everyone wants something. And if you try to give a little bit for everyone you will try to please everyone. And the result is you please no one. And still you will lead the team to frustrations. That's not what you want to do as a product person. What you want to do is to ensure alignment. And alignment here it means stakeholders can commit to the result. And it's fine if you're not delivering everything for every stakeholder. Because you are delivering what matters the most for that moment. So that is the reason you should pursue alignment instead of satisfaction. Because once you go for alignment stakeholders will ultimately be satisfied by real results. And this is more a medium term result. It can be at the beginning they will not be so satisfied with your work. But on the medium run they will understand. And on the other side if you try to go for pleasing everyone, in the short term they will be very happy with you. Because you are the cool guy who are pleasing everyone and so on. But then in the medium run results will not come. And then they will not be satisfied with you. And you will have a big problem my friend. That's not what we want. And connecting to the third part now is about the goal. Do you have a goal to pursue? Or are you just doing things for the sake of doing? Unfortunately many companies they have teams and teams do things for the sake of doing. They start improving for the sake of improving. That's not gonna lead you anywhere. And you have to find a goal to pursue. And whenever stakeholders come with something you can ask them what will help you to achieve the goal. The importance of the goal is to get the alignment you need with the stakeholders. Because whenever they come with their wants you can clearly ask why this is important to help us get closer to the goal. And you want to find things that will accelerate the team to reach the goal. And whatever it comes as a distraction to achieve the goal that is what you are gonna say no. Because you want to ensure the team is progressing towards the goal. And you want to avoid the team is progressing in a different direction than the one you agreed upon. And this is the importance of having a goal. You start with the end in mind which is the impact you want to reach. And how can you measure that? And you focus on the impact. And this will help you to align with stakeholders. Without a goal to achieve teams become no more than a feature factory. And that's not what you want to do. To summarize everything here. Know who your stakeholders are. They are not your customers. They are also not your enemies. But they are your partners. Don't try to please everyone. Strive for alignment. And create a goal to pursue and avoid distractions. I would be curious to get to know your experience by handling multiple stakeholders. Just write the comments and then we exchange on this. And if you like this video don't forget to hit the like button. If you want more content similar to this one subscribe for more. Thanks for watching.