Читать книгу EMPOWERED - Marty Cagan - Страница 44

Many of the points regarding team collaboration skills also apply to stakeholder collaboration skills, but it's actually easier to build trust and relationships with your own teammates (e.g., your designer and engineers) because you interact with them every day—focused on solving the same problem.

There are additional dynamics at play with stakeholders. First of all, while most PMs are individual contributors, most stakeholders are company executives. They are often very knowledgeable about their part of the business, and they are often used to giving orders.

The key to successful working relationships with stakeholders is establishing mutual trust.

For the PM, that starts with putting in the time and effort to understand what each of the stakeholder's constraints are. We discussed this under Business and Company Knowledge above.

But once the PM has put in that effort, she needs to personally convince each stakeholder that she understands what they are concerned with, and that she'll make every effort to come up with solutions that work for them.

And in any case, whenever she identifies something that might be of concern, she will preview those solutions with that stakeholder before the team builds anything.

Building this trust takes time, as there are less interactions, and each interaction carries more weight.

Again, in my work with product teams, I often observe PM/stakeholder interactions and there are many good coaching opportunities. I try to reinforce the actions that helped build trust and point out alternative approaches for actions that diminish trust.