Product management is, in reality, all about stakeholder management.
However, buy-in from the right stakeholders only happens when you have the right resources and support. Contrarily, if key stakeholders disagree with you, it doesn’t matter how great your idea is. It’s not getting developed anytime soon.
In other words, the better you are at managing stakeholders, the better product manager you become. To help demystify stakeholder management, you can use tools that introduce a structured approach for your product team.
One one of these tools is the power and interest grid. Keep reading to learn more about what it is, its benefits, and tips for its implementation.
The power and interest grid is a handy tool that makes stakeholder management more tangible.
It’s a 2×2 matrix that differentiates four main groups of stakeholders based on interest and power:
Interest indicates whether a particular stakeholder cares about what happens with a specific initiative or not. Generally speaking, the more your initiative impacts the area of responsibility of a particular stakeholder, the more interest they tend to have.
Power indicates the influence the stakeholder has on this particular initiative. It’s different from the general power within the organization. For example, the Chief People Officer might have a lot of influence on the organization in general but little influence on the specific features you are building.
Remember, stakeholder management isn’t a science. Don’t try to be overly precise, and don’t overthink it. A high-level assessment of power and interest is often enough.
By identifying the level of power and interest of each stakeholder, you’ll end up with four segments of stakeholders:
People that have both high interest and influence on your initiative are what many people call “key stakeholders.”
These people are your main collaborators and the most important people to satisfy.
They’re often willing to pick up some extra work to help the initiative succeed, so use that.
Powerful people with low interest are tricky to manage.
First of all, make sure they’re satisfied. Even if someone is completely uninterested, trust me, if they become annoyed or unsatisfied for some reason, they’ll get annoyed.
Secondly, identify people who you believe can help you succeed and whom you can easily keep satisfied, and try to make them interested. If you succeed, you’ll get a few more key stakeholders on your side, and that’s always beneficial.
People who are highly interested in the initiative, but not really influential should be kept in the information loop.
There’s a reason they’re interested, so they do deserve to be kept in the loop. But since they can’t really either help or harm the initiative, it’s okay if they are not super happy with the direction.
After all, you can’t satisfy everyone, so focus on people who have the power to impact the outcome.
People without either power or interest can be mostly ignored.
Just make sure you check on them every now and then. You never know when they become interested or influential.
For larger organizations, mapping every single stakeholder might be excessive.
Instead, you can consider treating some of them as groups:
For example, if all engineering managers show roughly similar influence and interest, but one specific engineering manager has a lot of influence and power, you can map engineering managers as a group while having a separate position for the influential one.
That way, the grid will be more readable and easier to use than if you had mapped everyone individually.
The power and interest grid is by far my favorite tool for stakeholder management, and there are strong reasons for that.
Stakeholder management itself can be a daunting and ambiguous challenge.
The power and interest grid makes it simpler as you:
This is one of the best examples of making a complex challenge a simple task.
Interest and power are great criteria for identifying which stakeholders to focus on the most and which ones you can ignore.
This focused approach to stakeholder management ensures you don’t waste time and you cover all your bases.
There are a few things to keep in mind to make the power and interest grid even more efficient.
That one might be controversial.
Although I am a big fan of transparency in product management, some things should be kept private. One of these is the power and interest grid.
The reason?
People will always exaggerate the influence they have and their interests. They’ll keep chasing you to update the matrix or to justify why you put them in a particular quadrant.
Not to mention the issues that arise when people start comparing themselves to each other. “Why do you think person X has more influence than me?!?” will be quite common.
The benefits of transparency are greatly outweighed by the issues it creates.
The power and interest grid is useless if it doesn’t prompt specific actions. To truly benefit from using it, you need to have a clear strategy on how you’ll interact with a particular quadrant.
For example, consider continuous stakeholder interviews for your key stakeholders, while a dedicated email thread might be enough for high-interest and low-power people.
People’s influence and interest change over time. Don’t miss these changes.
Working on outdated power and interest grids can be more harmful than not using any tool at all.
While you don’t need to be 100 percent up-to-date with every single stakeholder, ensure you always know who your key stakeholders (high power and interest) are.
If particular stakeholders are on your side or have high power but are uninterested, then make them interested.
Explain how the initiative can help them and why they should care about the success of the initiative.
The more allies you have in your highly interested high-power quadrant, the better. Don’t leave it to luck.
I’ve been dealing with stakeholder management for almost a decade now, and the power and interest grid is my favorite tool to guide the process.
The idea of grouping stakeholders by power and interest is an extremely simple yet efficient approach.
However, it covers only one side of the stakeholder management process.
It doesn’t matter how precise and accurate your grid is if you don’t act on it.
Experiment with different strategies to collaborate with your key stakeholders. Find efficient ways to keep interested stakeholders informed. Find the easiest ways to keep influential yet uninterested stakeholders satisfied. Last but not least, learn how to notice changes in influence and power over time.
Combine stakeholder identification (e.g., power and interest grid) with stakeholder engagement to truly become a master of stakeholder management.
Featured image source: IconScout
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