Slow Down and Show Your Work

When meeting with stakeholders, don’t start with your conclusions. Instead, slow down and show your work. Throughout this book, you’ve learned to use an opportunity solution tree to help you chart the best path to your desired outcome. This same visual can help you share your work with your stakeholders. Just like it’s easy for us to get distracted by shiny new ideas, it’s also easy for our stakeholders to get distracted. It’s our job to set the context for how product decisions are made. Your opportunity solution tree helps you do exactly that. And just like it helped you and your team build confidence in your decisions, it will do the same for your stakeholders.

When meeting with stakeholders, start at the top of your tree. Remind your stakeholders what your desired outcome is. Ask them if anything has changed since you last agreed to this outcome. This sets the scope for the conversation.

Share how you mapped out the opportunity space. Highlight the top-level opportunities. Drill into the detail only when and where they ask for it. Ask them if you missed anything. Consider that they may have knowledge of opportunities that you might have missed. Capture their suggestions. You can always vet them in your future customer interviews.

Share how you assessed and prioritized the opportunity space. Use the tree structure to walk through each decision you made. Choose the appropriate level of detail based on the stakeholder you are talking to. Ask them if they would have made a different decision at each decision point. Consider their feedback.

Share more context about your target opportunity. Help them fully understand the customer need or pain point you intend to address. Use your interview snapshots to help your stakeholders empathize with your customers. Answer their questions. This step is critical. Your stakeholder needs to fully understand the opportunity you are pursuing before you share solutions with them. This is what sets the context for how to evaluate solutions and moves the conversation away from opinions and preferences.

Share the solutions you generated. Ask them if they have any of their own ideas. Make sure you capture and consider them. Share the set of three solutions you plan to move forward with. Ask them if they would have chosen a different set. Stay open-minded. You may have invested time and energy into your solution set, but remember: Solution ideas are a dime a dozen. The key criteria for your first solution set is diversity. Your stakeholders can often help you generate more diverse ideas than what your team can do on their own. If that’s the case, don’t be afraid to swap in some of their ideas.

If you’ve already started assumption testing, share your story maps and your assumption lists. Make sure your stakeholders fully understand how each solution might work. Remember, this is where opinions and preferences might pop up again. Gently remind your stakeholders what your target opportunity is. Ask your stakeholders to add to your assumption lists. This is where their unique knowledge and expertise can be invaluable for helping us catch our own blind spots.

Share your assumption map. Be sure to add any of the assumptions that your stakeholders identified. Ask them if they would have prioritized the assumptions differently. Make adjustments as needed.

Share your assumption tests. If you have data, share the data. Otherwise, share your execution plans. Ask for feedback. Consider and integrate their feedback.

Repeat.

When we show our work, we are inviting our stakeholders to co-create with us. Instead of sharing our conclusions and inviting them to share their preferences, we are sharing our work and inviting them to assess our thinking and to add their own. We are leveraging their expertise and improving our process.

Finally, I described this process as a one-time event. But a good product trio knows to continuously manage stakeholders. Share your work along the way, rather than all at the end. Be thoughtful about when and how to share your work. Some stakeholders will want all the details week over week; others might want the highlights monthly. Adapt to what your stakeholders need. But even if they ask for outputs, take the time to show the work that helped you conclude those were the right outputs.