 Awesome. We're live. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's Product School Talk. As you guys know, we teach product management, coding, and data courses at our six campuses. Today we have an awesome guest of us, as always. His name is Alex McCarthy. He's worked in product management, software, marketing, and sales at companies from early stage startups to global, publicly traded companies. He's got a lot of experience in the field. Welcome, Alex. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Cassandra. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Greatly appreciate it. Thank you for being here with us today. I know you have a presentation, so I'm going to give you a little bit of time to get that set up. And guys, while he's setting up, as you know, once his presentation is finished, we're going to take questions so you can just type those in the chat box. If you have a question during a presentation, feel free to type it in, but we'll get to it following his presentation. So once he's done, Alex, it looks like you're all set up. I am. Awesome. I'll let you take it from here. Awesome. Thanks, Cassandra. Once again, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for joining. I greatly appreciate your time. So what I wanted to do today was just go through and explain, A, what stakeholder management is, and why it's important, and then just give you some really practical tips. Has somebody who has sat through a lot of product managers making pitches and presentations to, you know, influence what happens to their products. It could be asking for resources. It could be wanting to make a change, you know, pricing, major pricing change, channel change, whatever. And there's just some things that will make it way, way, way better. So that's kind of the point. It's from a leader's perspective. You know, what do I want to see? And the other thing I'll say is I learned a lot of these the hard way over the course of my career. And so hopefully this will help you avoid some of those and do a lot better than I did. So here we go. So let me just... So this is about me. Most recently I was VP of Product Management at a company here in Austin called American Innovations. They do Internet of Things and compliance enterprise compliance software for oil and gas companies. I founded a company called Navigate. Next about a year ago to help leaders, particular product leaders make smarter job transitions faster. And there's my contact info. So quick summary, we want to make sure that you understand that what stakeholder managers is, why it's critical to you and to your career. Then who they are and how to talk about them, understand what they care about it. You know, everyone walks around in the world saying, you know, what's in it for me? And so the more you understand what's in it for me from their perspective, then the better off you'll be. And in some cases you could view them as internal customers. So you want to speak in the language of the customer and the way the customer speaks about the things that they care about. And then following that we'll talk about the five tips. So first thing is a stakeholder is anybody who can affect or is affected by your work. And as a product manager, you're in the center of things, which is one of the best things about being a product manager is that you're in the center of things. Therefore you have a lot of stakeholders. Put the little diagram to the left. It's the blues are the internal ones and the greens are the external ones. A couple of them that I want to point out is if you have channel partners that help sell or complete your product, they're definitely a stakeholder. And if you have key suppliers, then their stakeholders as well because they can definitely influence your product success. If the things are supplying don't meet the needs and don't get their own time and so on. So think outside the company as well as inside the company. The thing you're looking for is access to resources. The resources that you need will vary clearly depending upon where you are on the product lifecycle, the size of your company, what you're trying to do with your products. And ultimately what you want to develop through influencing your stakeholders that you develop champions for your product and also for you. And both of those things are very important and they're actually very closely linked. Communicating clearly in the language that they care about and talking about what's in it for me is the foundation of how you influence without authority. So tip number one. So the score model. This is a model I came up with a while back after having tried some different things and it not working. I was talking with the CEO of a company I worked at after a meeting that didn't necessarily go so well, but he was a champion and a mentor of mine. And I said basically what the heck went wrong. I thought I had this thing nailed up. He said, Alex, why don't you just tell us what the heck is happening? What the child, what the problem is? What do you consider? What do you recommend and what do you want us to do next? Just lay it out like that and we'll be in a much better shape. I said, great. And so I went and thought about it and I came up with the score model and I've used it successfully ever since. So S is a situation. What's happening? What's the context? Who's affected? How affected are they? C is the challenge. So fundamentally, what are you trying to accomplish that you can't accomplish that you're standing in front of us asking for resources? What options did you consider? Basically, as a leader, I want to make sure that you've thought about different options and you're not coming in with, you know, here's the answer that you've gone out and done some due diligence. You know, something will be fairly straightforward and some of them might be pretty creative ways of overcoming the challenge that's facing you. The next thing I want to hear is what do you recommend that we do specifically? What do you recommend that we do? So if you have five or six options, great. Is it option three? Is it a combination of option three and option four? But just lay it out and make it very clear. And then if we were to agree to do this, what do you want us to do next? What do we have to execute to make it successful? And by laying it out in that way, people around the table with varying degrees of understanding of the situation, what you're asking for, why you're asking for it, will be able to come up to speed and will be able to give you some very clear direction. So you've made your presentation, you use this model. The next thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you capture the decision. You've made it very clear that this is your recommendation and what the decision you're looking for is that we do what we should do next, called out in the execution. You want to make sure you capture it. You know, yes, you got the green light move forward. You got to know. Great. Capture that. Maybe we'll do it. You know, ask some more questions need to be answered. Maybe we say layer and then whatever next steps are. So if it's maybe or later, great. What are the next steps? Well, we visit in six months and we need this data. Do it in a, you know, visible way. So if you're in a conference room, go to the whiteboard, everyone can see what was decided. If you're on a conference call or screen sharing, then just go into PowerPoint in your regular mode view mode and just start typing on a slide. The key thing is that everybody walking out of the room understands what was done and what the next steps are. All right, tip number two. This is build a stakeholder influence map. And the reason you want to build a map, which is shown on the lower left hand side and we'll talk about more that more detail in a minute. Is you really want to be deliberate or intentional about how you're managing your stakeholders. So the first thing is, you know, create a list. The next thing is map them using the interest and influence two by two in the lower left hand corner. And then finally develop the needs list. What they need and what you need and proactively manage that get ahead of the curve. So this is what your stakeholders typically need. So CEO, a general manager, what they need is a product plan that supports the business goals and the company strategy. So if their goal is record growth, great. What's your product plan that's going to support that if they need to generate cash. And they want to cash how your product portfolio. Great. What's the plan to do that? It's a very different plan in the high growth one. What do you need from them? What do you need from your CEO in particular? You need funding, you know, to go do whatever your product plan is. You need his support that he can then influence the other functional heads of the heads to yep. Alex has got his stuff together. He's, you know, got a great plan. I really need you to step up and provide him the help that he needs to make it happen. Let's jump down to the marketing VP. What do they need? They need a really good understanding of the customer problems. What's our unique value prop? What's the best way to reach the customers? Kind of where's their water cooler? You know, where do they hang out online? What are the great blogs they read? And what you need from them is to help, you know, refine the market positioning and running campaigns and prioritizing, you know, how they handle the leads and nurturing campaigns that you get, you know, preferential treatment when it comes to say trade shows or whatever the case may be. So those are a couple examples of what's unique between what they need, what's in it for them and what's in it for me. So now let's look at how we map those stakeholders onto this two by two and what we do with that. So for people who are low influence and low interest, basically just provide them general information, you know, when needed. Keep it high level, keep it periodic, not too often, not too much detail. For those that have a low interest and high influence, these are the folks you kind of need to be careful about. Because if they're not following and tracking what you're doing and you're asking to make a major investment and then up to speed, then they can cause you to trip and slow you down, ask a lot of questions because they're not informed. So what you want to do is satisfy their needs when required. And when you have a major initiative or ask that you want to ask the leadership team, make sure and get in front of them, spend some time with them to make sure they understand and that they're supporting what you're proposing. The next group is, you know, very high interest but maybe not so influential. There, you really need to understand what their needs are and solicit their input. Once again, typically these are the people who will make a lot of noise about, you know, some topic related to your product or project that you're trying to get funded. And you want to make sure that they're singing up the same song sheet and they're not saying something that is counter to what you're proposing. And then finally, those that have a high influence and are very interested in what you're doing, you want to manage them closely and this is really being fully engaged. So if it's the, you know, VP of development who's, you know, obviously in lots of cases going to have high influence and high interest in what you're doing, make sure you're meeting with him on a regular basis. You're really listening to what he's saying. You understand what he needs. And ideally if possible make him part of the product team. If not him, certainly someone, a director, one of his lieutenants is part of that so that you've got their support and can get their feedback on an ongoing basis. Tip number three, someone walks into your room. I think if you've been pretty much at any role inside a company, but specifically product managers, it seems that they get the most of these. You get someone who's influential walking into your room with this really, really dumb idea. Let's just be honest, the first blush, it's really dumb. The goal you want to do is to get them to say no to themselves rather than you saying no and getting into a, you know, headbutting or conflict situation. So the first thing I recommend is really listen and understand it. There may be a golden nugget in there that's worth pursuing. That wasn't really apparent based on the way they said it or it came across. Ask a lot of clarifying questions. Do you mean this? Okay, great. The next thing is, if you still think it's a dumb idea, start asking them how it benefits the business or the customers or improves other things that they care about. And on the next slide, I have a list of questions that you can use. And ideally, in this case, if you ask them how it benefits your customers and they don't have a really good answer, then they'll go, yeah, you know what, maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Or how does it help you beat your competition? Well, it actually really doesn't. So yeah, you're right. Maybe it's not such a great idea. If they still persist, then you can talk about potential trade-offs. Okay, if we go and add this feature to the product, it's going to delay their product release by, you know, three months and it's going to raise the price or whatever the case may be. You have to be, once again, honest and appropriate in how you scale things, but try and go through some of the trade-offs. And once again, you hope that they'll say, yeah, okay, this doesn't make sense. Finally, here's the last resort. If they continue to say this is a really great idea, then you basically need to delay any kind of decision. So you can go talk to other stakeholders to see if they agree and to help explain what the idea is and why you should prioritize it. You know, you want to collect more data the way that merits. Finally, something that I found really, really effective is just to propose a fast and low-cost experiment. So they're proposing something that they say benefits the customers. They propose, listen, let's get some more details. I'll go out and call 10 customers in the next two weeks. I'll ask them some very specific questions and I'll come back with that data and we'll have a better idea of what they really think about it. So that buys you some time as well as gets you some more data. Here's a list of questions. I'm not going to go through them. I'll give you just a second to skim them. But all these questions start provoking in the person's mind of, yeah, how is this actually tying back to something that's important to the company? Tip number four, practice transparency. So this is really critical for two reasons. One is you want all your stakeholders to be informed no matter their level of influence or their level of influence. If you can have one place for them to go, they can look up and find out what's going on without sending you an email calling you or walking in your office, you can end up doing all day. Put a wiki or an internal site if using SharePoint or Slack channel where they can go and get the latest and greatest. Put the highest level information at the top. So for people who have low interest and just want to get a high level, great. They can get that fairly quickly and then more details will be kind of further down the list if you will. Consider what they need, right? So if you know your CEO needs this, make sure that's kind of at a dashboard at a high level. If you're a director of Dev who's very detail-oriented and wants to know what's happening with the releases or the business or sales, great, you put that information a little bit lower down. Always ask for feedback. And the final and probably most important point if you decide to go with some sort of wiki or site is always keep it up to date because the first time someone goes to the site looking for information and it's out of date is also the last time they'll go to the site to look for information because then they're going to have to call you to make sure that actually the latest and greatest key way to do that is just put a little note saying updated as of and then the date and that way they'll know, okay, it was done on Friday, today's Tuesday, we're probably in good shape. Oh, it was done three weeks ago because you've been traveling? Yeah, then I know I need to go ask Alex for an update so make it really clear what the last updates were. Tip number five, be conversant in their language. So if you're conversational in their language, they're more productive and you can have more influence. So I say something like Parle Vue France, say, right? So these speak French. In this case, it's Parle Vue Finance. Every stakeholder in a functional group will have their own words that they use for shorthand. So if you're speaking to someone in finance, they'll talk about GAAP and SOX and deferred earnings and balance sheets and assets and things like that. Sales has quotas and pipelines. Marketing has their campaigns and qualified leads and handoffs. So if you have an understanding of what they're talking about in the language they're talking about it, it does two things. One is it allows you to be more conversant and credibility and the second one is then more influential because you don't have to spend time asking them to translate what they're talking about into your language and then you can have a good idea of what needs to be done and explain that in their language. This is really, really easy to do if you'll invest some time. There's tons of blogs and videos and training out there that you can do on ad hoc, after hours basis and you'd be surprised. Take something like sales, how sales works. Four to six hours over the course of a couple of weeks will bring you a long way to improving your ability to probably do sales. So just in conclusion, influencing stakeholders is really critical to your career and it's very critical to your product success. It's a heck of a lot easier if you follow some very basic tips. I gave you five, there's more. But certainly just get some, put them into practice and that's what the thing on the left is. Just start somewhere. Hopefully one of these ideas is useful and you can pick it up and start using it now, start now. And then if you focus your communications and talk about what they need and the language that they care about and provide transparent update information, you'll turn your stakeholders into champions. And for those of you who have champions in your companies or at your customers or channel partners or suppliers, you probably already know just how valuable it is to have a champion for you. So developing more and more champions where you are is just a huge advantage to your product and to your career. So with that, Sandra, do we have questions? Do you want to stop? Yeah, thank you for a great presentation too. I'm just actually letting everybody know as well on YouTube that they can start dropping in questions. So let me check here and see if we have any so far. Let's see. Here, can you actually share some of your favorite books or resources that you've used along your way in product management? Yes, I can. I think why I'm pulling those up, one of the questions that comes up often after I present this is what do you do if you make a mistake? Which happens to all of us and how do you recover from making a mistake? And so the first thing is just admit it upfront. Hey, you made a mistake. Own it. People will respect you for it and as you're owning it, say what you're going to do to fix it. The next thing is don't throw anyone else under the bus, even if it was clearly somebody else's fault as the product owner and quote unquote the mini CEO of your product family. Ultimately, it's your neck that people are looking to ring. And just great. You can build a lot of relationship and respect with your colleagues if you say, hey, yeah, I should have been on top of this. This thing happened in the release. It wasn't caught. So here's what we're going to do next time. The final thing around recovering from mistakes is then make sure that you actually follow up on what it is that you did. You say you're going to go do this, so go do it. And then the final thing, especially if you're in an agile environment and you're going to do your retrospective, is bring it up again and put it in the lessons learned and then what are you going to stop doing or start doing to make sure that that doesn't happen again. By owning it, you'll gain credibility and get things solved faster. By not owning it, it's just going to fester and people are going to end up blaming you anyway. So I'm having a little bit of trouble with my resources. No worries. I'm going to actually pull up another question that just came through and speaking of similar aspects of what you were talking about. But how do you manage situations where stakeholders disagree? So I guess there's two ways of looking at that. So the first one is if they disagree with what you're proposing. And the second one is if they disagree with each other. So if they disagree with you, that should not be found out when you're kind of at the big meeting. As you're circulating and socializing your ideas, hopefully that's one of those things that would come up earlier and you can hopefully persuade them otherwise. If you can't persuade them otherwise and they just fundamentally disagree, then bring that up as part of the situation up front. Here's the situation, but whatever we don't have consensus around is just the right thing to go. And here's some, it's their concerns. The VPS sales is not sure the customers are going to pay the extra price increase or whatever it is. And then you go through the rest of the situation and then your recommendations would hopefully address that or you just acknowledge that we're going to agree to disagree and here's what your execution is. One of your execution steps using that as an example is to go out and do customer interviews or pricing tests or whatever to see what the actual feedback would be in that situation. So you're acknowledging it, you're owning it, the guy's been heard, and you're proposing something to do about it or you're proposing just to agree to disagree. The other thing is if something comes up where two, the leaders that are say high influence, one may be low interest, high interest, but they're above high influence and they can't come to some agreement is then what you want to propose as the decision that's made in the meeting is less delay. And try and get the questions that are causing the disagreement. What are you looking for? What specifically is the issue? Once again, write them on the whiteboard, put them in your slides so everybody understands and then just say great, we'll work through it and we'll reconvene it when we have a good way to move forward. So it may not be the success you're looking for but it certainly gives you a clear mandate to move forward and the main point is if you solve those issues then hopefully you get the green light next time and you're not continually thrashing. Right, absolutely. Let me see if we have more questions coming through. Let me pick one here. Let's see. Can you actually share your advice for aspiring product managers out there? Oh, sure. I think the number one thing for good product managers is be passionate about your product. There is nothing like having somebody just talking about something that they're passionate about. It's infectious. Other people want to be part of it. You have an idea of what your mission in life is or your product's mission in life is and that will overcome so many barriers that come up including this other people's perception. If you're excited about something and presenting it in a positive way and you're overcoming barriers, other people will say, wow, this guy's on to something. How can I help him out? Your parade grows pretty quickly. The second thing is, I would say, is just curiosity. Curiosity on technology, curiosity on business, on market trends, read widely, poke around when you find things interesting, great, find and talk to interesting people. There's just so many great ideas out there and if you're curious, you'll grow both professionally from a career standpoint but also your products will benefit and your company will benefit. I guess those are kind of two things I would recommend for aspiring product managers. Great, awesome. Thank you. Go ahead and we can close it out from there. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you taking the time to present. A lot of great feedback on that. So one question from everybody is if we can get the slides after. So I'm sure we can send everyone a link to those. Awesome. Well then, great. Thank you so much again for being here today. Sandra, I really appreciate the opportunity and your help in setting this up and I thank you everyone for attending. So glad to hear by people asking for the slides that it was so useful. Yeah, definitely. Actually, we had one more question sneaking. So if you have a minute. This one is from Robert. Do you have a guide on which stakeholders to attack first for new ideas? Oh, perfect question. Robert, good for you. So yes. So what I'll do is I will add a slide after this about how to socialize your ideas. So it'll be in writing digitally forever. But the basic idea is think of concentric circles. So where you want to start is in the inner circle. And that is the people who are high influence and high interest. And just, you know, get them on board either individually or, you know, a small group meeting, just maybe you and two people at most. Make sure that your idea has merit. Make sure that they agree with it. That's one of the basic questions. And once they're on board, then you can go up to that second level of circle, which is maybe you're high influencers that aren't so interested, or people that you know are going to have really strong opinions about it and engage them, you know, one on one. And then you have a second meeting that has maybe six people in it or seven people in it. And then once they have consensus, then you can do the broad socialization for the people that are low interest, low influence and tee up the kind of, the meeting, if you will, where you make the big ask. So that's how it socializes. Really small core group, an interested group next, and then kind of everybody who needs to know last. Okay, great. I will add the slide on that. So I need a couple of minutes to get the slide added. I've already got it done somewhere else. So I'll put it in there and we'll get the slides out. Perfect, perfect. Yeah, everybody then we'll get you the slides. Thank you again and thanks for taking the time Absolutely. And thanks everyone for joining us this week. We'll be back again next week of course with another great webinar and we also host events at our campuses every week as well. So hopefully we'll see you at one of those soon. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day and thank you. Bye.