 Hey everyone, my name is Vik Mehta and today I'm going to talk about stakeholder partnerships. I have three goals for this presentation. One, introduce myself. Two, explain why you should care about stakeholder partnerships. And three, just some tips and tactics on how to go about it. It's about me in a nutshell, right? I'm married. I have a four-year-old and my wife's also fellow PM, so like all PMs, we own several whiteboards. I've volunteered most of my life for several causes, including in the literacy project. And I'm an avid bicyclist. On the professional front, I've walked my way through undergrad and grad school and have an engineering and a business degree. And my career can be divided into three distinct phases. I started my PM career with building awesome consumer TV experiences at Cisco and Sling. Then moved on to EV charging at ChargePoint. And then more recently in the HR Tech space at Meta. So who are stakeholders and why should I care? So in terms of who they are, right? It's anyone outside your day-to-day team that's not building the product. It could be your VP of operations or your customer service manager or the director of marketing. Why should I care about them? They help build what my previous VP used to call the product sound. So your product is not an island, right? It's not just the hardware product that you ship or an app that you ship. There's the go-to-market strategy that goes with it. There's the customer service aspect to it. They are the ones that are actually building that product sound for you. And it's super important to bring them along because they will amplify your product's impact. And that's one of the reasons why you should partner up with them. Not manage a partner up with them. And I'll explain why. Okay, let's talk about tips and tactics to deal with stakeholder management and partnership. We as PMs love our lifecycle diagrams, love frameworks. So here's a framework for you. One is have a partnership mindset. And we'll go into details on why that matters. Two, proactively identify the stakeholders in your org. Three, gain credibility with them by being the experts on your customer needs and how it impacts your org. Four, explain to them why what you do matters using big animal pictures, diving deep with data, or connecting the dots. Then ask for what you need, right? Make sure you're up front with what you need. Finally, close the loops with your partners. And it's easy to get in the day-to-day and forget that it's a partnership. So every once in a while you need to reset and think about this as a partnership again. And that's why I've closed the loop there. Let's dive deep into each one of them. Partner's mindset, right? Like I explained, stakeholders can magnify your product's impact. And instead of trying to manage them, which is such a negative way of looking at things, partner up with them. It's a mindset change, but your partners will actually appreciate it. Okay, let's go about proactively identifying them. So whenever you join a new company or are responsible for a new product area, ask around on what the key stakeholders outside the core product and engineering and design teams. Create an explicit map. Can't recommend this enough. Like once you have a map of who is responsible for what, and it's explicit, it's on paper, it helps a lot. Another framework to help you think about this is the RACI framework. Just Google it, but at a high level, there are stakeholders who are responsible for the business outcome, or stakeholders who are accountable for an outcome, or stakeholders who need to be consulted when you make an important decision, or stakeholders who need to be informed when you're doing something. So that's just another framework to keep in mind. Gain credibility. How do you do that? You need to be the expert on customer needs. That's the one thing you should do as a PM, always be the expert on your customer needs. Knowing what matters to your stakeholders, knowing what matters to your customers, and how it impacts the org is key to your credibility. How do you do that? Like how do you know your customer needs? That's PM 101, but what repeating? Get out of the building, which is pick up the phone, talk to your customer virtually, or just talk to them by going on site or observing them. Other ways are looking at your customer service reports, looking at your app reviews or Amazon reviews if you want to consume a product, or social media comments. There's so much information out there. It's amazing. And sometimes you can look at your other key metrics such as engagement, retention, John, that way just be the expert on your customer needs. And it's important when you talk to your stakeholders because they're going to ask you, why does this matter? And you need to explain it to them, which leads me to my next slide. Your stakeholders are not in the weeds of your product. They don't know every single detail. They operate at the 10,000 foot level. So you need to be able to simplify using what one of my previous director of product taught me is using big animal pictures, simplify things for them, help them have that aha moment. If some stakeholders want to dive deep, dive deep, but don't forget your metrics, don't forget data. The other way you can explain is connect the dots, right? Your natural position will enable you to connect dots, leverage it. This is not super obvious. So let me explain what using an example. So let's say you own a hardware product and your marketing team is going to run and campaign to drive demand. It's important your operations team knows about it because they need to be able to meet that demand. Conversely, and it's true today. If you have supply chain issues, you need to inform your marketing team so that they don't spend money on campaign dollars to drive demand because they can't meet it. The stakeholders will really, really appreciate that you connected the dots for them. Finally, just ask upfront what you need and explain why it matters to the org using big animal pictures, connecting the dots, but be very, very clear on what you need and why. And if I'm a stakeholder, I'm going to ask, hey, what are the risks of this thing? What if it doesn't work out? You're making a product bet, which might be informed, but what if it doesn't work out? Or what are the downsides of this product bet that you're making? So you need to talk about the risks and also show that you've talked about some mitigation strategies. And all this will do is ease their minds. You'll gain credibility because they'll think you are a therapy and you've thought about pretty much everything. Finally, close loops relentlessly. And what this means in practice, right? Again, a very abstract concept, but super important. So again, let me give an example. Let's say your VP of operations and customer service have agreed on a new feature for you if it's a hardware product. It adds cost to the product. It's that customer service that it hates. But it's worth it because you think it improves the customer experience. So now you've shipped the product. It's been a few months. And you notice that feedback in an Amazon review or a customer just telling you face to face, hey, that's pretty cool what you guys just did here. Take that nugget of information and share it with all your stakeholders because chances are they've already forgotten what they did and why. But now you close the loop with them and they will have that aha moment. And you will also gain trust and credibility with them saying, yep, I do this. I see the impact here somewhere. And hopefully the impact is always on making the customer's life better or move some business metric that you care about. So in closing, stakeholder partnerships amplify the impact of your product. Instead of trying to manage them, think of them as your partners and have that mindset they'll appreciate it. Proactively take the time and energy to identify them in the org. Ask around. Gain credibility by being the subject matter expert on your customer needs. Explain. Use big animal pictures, but dive deep with data. Explain again. Connect the dots for them. You as a PM are a natural bond connector. Leverage that. Don't forget to ask for what you need and explain any potential risks. Finally, close the loops relentlessly. So if you got what you needed or if they have contributed to your product and you've seen the impact in either customer feedback or a metric moving in the right direction or even in the wrong direction, close those loops with your stakeholders. They'll really, really appreciate it. Thank you for your time today. If you have any questions, feel free to connect with me on the phone. Thank you.