How do you deal with demanding stakeholders?
We run into demanding stakeholders, who ’d want their requests be at the top of our roadmap! It might be hard to prioritize conflicting requests when you have limited resources.
“Economic resources are scarce. Faced with this scarcity, we must choose how to allocate our resources.”
Investopedia
How do these requests fit into your roadmap?
As a team, we need to ensure that these requests fit into our long and medium-term roadmap.
- Sometimes, a marketing person might not know that someone else in charge of a product and might might approach you for implementing the features. In that case, you need to connect them with the correct product manager.
- Offer transparency into what your team is working on so that they are aware about what they are asking you to switch over to.
- If it does fit the roadmap, then it might be better to determine where it fits (small-medium-long term). Have your team estimate when it is feasible to implement this feature. Does the feature benefit other customers too?
- Conduct workshops with the product team to learn the estimate on those features. One idea to consider is addressing the low-hanging fruits (i.e. maybe it is #2 in value but takes very less time to deliver) and then work on the topmost initiative (which might say take 2 years to deliver).
- You ’d need to rejig the roadmap accordingly so that the feature can be accommodated. You may have to have difficult conversations with customers, whose features you have deprioritized.
Are there services that you can provide instead of promised features?
In an ideal world, we ’d like to deliver everything as promised. But, if we have priorities change due to change in the market landscape then we might not be able to satisfy all our stakeholders. A thought that comes to mind is if we can trade features with other services until features aren’t available.
What pain points they have to live with until you have delivered the features?
Ultimately, you ’d need to help the stakeholders come up with a reasonable workaround for the pain points until you are able to deliver the features.
Final Thoughts
You can prepare different types of roadmaps like “Now-Next-Later” roadmap or “Jobs-to-be-done” and so on. But depending on the situation, the priorities might change. For example - What you never planned might show up as “Now” in your roadmap. During the COVID pandemic, we had to build emergency software to monitor ventilators remotely, so that such patients could get better out-of-hospital care. Stakeholders will have to be managed with utmost care so that they don’t feel neglected and can run their businesses while awaiting their requested features.