Stakeholders
Gears meshing together by Bill Oxford
When speaking with clients and prospects about Product Management and Product Marketing, the topic of cross-functional engagement or stakeholder management will invariably come up. That’s for good reason — a commercial software business has a lot of moving parts with dedicated parties managing those parts. I’ve spent a career working to balance the needs of these different parties and I can’t overstate the importance of getting it right.
With a product of any significance in scale or customer adoption, Product Management and Product Marketing teams can’t focus on just “the product” as defined by the customer business problems and the features and functions created help them solve those problems. Rather, these two groups need to understand deeply the business that is being operated around the product(s) and make investment decisions that balance the overall needs of the business and advance the business as a whole. Like a nest full of baby birds, there are many mouths to feed.
The Development team: They created the product on platforms that age, often using open source and commercial libraries that age and are under constant attack, and they also created (or inherited) the bugs, performance problems, scalability problems, installation and maintenance problems, usability problems and more that the product will invariably have. All of this will get worse as the product ages and grows in usage and functional complexity, and they need to be able to allocate some percentage of their capacity to address all of these issues, or the problems will compound over time.
The Ops team is another crucial team for product success. This group of often unsung heroes needs to keep your product(s) running with high availability every day (how many “nines” did you commit to in your customer contracts?), respond to attacks, respond to issues and outages (whether ours, or our cloud platform providers, or third party services or their APIs), deploy patches or updates, ensure backup and recovery sites are operable, and much more. They need the system to be as automated and instrumented as possible, with tools and utilities to assist with the tasks still in hand, and all of that needs to be developed.
The mix of teams used for on-boarding can vary based on the complexity and configurability of the solution, as well as its capabilities, but it’s not uncommon to have teams that provision customers, configure the software for customers, train users or help the customer train users, and help manage the process for customers to validate and go live with the software. There may be a need to monitor customer utilization and to engage customers with the goal of keeping utilization (and received/perceived value) high. Customers don’t like paying high services costs (and these can also drive down your competitiveness), so as with the Ops team, the on-boarding teams need the product to automate as much of their work as possible, all of which also needs to be developed.
Commercial customers paying significant sums to solve mission critical problems, in particular, will expect you to have people on hand to answer questions and address issues that get in the way of their use of your product — and quickly. Support teams need the product to work well, they need bugs to be fixed and out of the way, and they may need to work with Dev and Ops to understand and troubleshoot issues once they’ve been duplicated. Let’s not forget that this group is also an excellent source of insight into emerging customer needs!
Product Marketing is responsible for making sure the commercial/Sales & Marketing teams have the messaging, training, assets, policies (think pricing and packaging and associated rules) and collateral they need to help launch and promote the product on an ongoing business and to win those crucial customer sales. In addition to needing effective tools and messages that remain effective as the competitive situation and market conditions change, they also need the implementation process to be short and inexpensive, the product reputation to be strong, and the ability to get customers provisioned and live to be unencumbered by internal constraints and friction. Sales and Marketing, meanwhile, will need to provide feedback loops to the Product Marketing team while the product, pricing, packaging, etc. are all in planning so that they can assess the impact to current plans, try to avoid unintended consequences, and also chart a path forward.
The keepers of the business systems and finances for your organization have needs too. They need to how much it’s costing us to run the product, what the incremental cost of a new customer is and how that changes over time (as usage increases and drives incremental API traffic and data volume, say). They will have questions about how product investments have affected both the revenue and cost sections of the P&L and will want access to the data that backs up whatever Product is asserting, so that they can do their own analysis and play with other KPIs of interest to them. They will want to see customer acquisition costs drop and annual contract values and customer lifetime values rise. And they will want to see high utilization and even higher renewal rates.
All of this needs a bit of a disclaimer, because I’ve found that every organization and solution pose different challenges and different sets of stakeholder needs. Some companies use a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy that eliminates or minimizes some of these stakeholders while pumping up the need for instrumentation, systems for storing and analyzing product data, and reporting of KPIs, which creates a different mix of needs for Product to pay attention to. Further, every problem being solved is different, and there are often many ways to solve each problem, each with its own pros and cons that affect the mix. Regardless, your Product team will need to sit at the intersection of the product, the customers, the teams that need to win in the market and make customers successful, and the teams that need to ensure the organization is sustainably profitable, and serve them all.
It’s stakeholder management, yes, but it’s really making sure that your product organization supports the operation of your business. It’s a complex and difficult role — and it’s important to have the right resources on board to do them well. If you need a hand working through these challenges, I’m happy to help.
As always, thanks for reading.
J
