Influence stakeholders like a pro
Insights with Danny Beck
One of the biggest hurdles for product leaders is the art of influencing peers and senior leadership. From managing expectations to balancing conflicting priorities, navigating stakeholder relationships can feel like an uphill battle. Product leaders often find themselves caught between the demands of different departments while trying to serve the needs of their teams. How can you keep everyone aligned while driving your vision for the product forward?
For many, navigating the constant demands of stakeholders can feel overwhelming and stressful. It’s challenging when everyone has their own priorities, often overshadowing the focus on the product itself. As a product leader, you’re tasked with not only keeping progress on track but also managing relationships with senior leadership and ensuring that your engineering teams are aligned. This role requires a thoughtful blend of empathy, effective communication, and strategic insight. It’s a tough balancing act, and it’s understandable to feel the weight of these responsibilities.
To explore this issue further, I sat down with Danny Beck, a seasoned product leader with extensive experience in industries such as AI, autonomous vehicles, and finance. As the former VP of Product at Monarch Tractor, Danny knows firsthand the complexities of managing and influencing stakeholders, especially in industries where a single product is both safety-critical and business-critical. His insights offer practical, grounded advice for product leaders struggling to gain buy-in and influence across teams.
Key Advice for Influencing Stakeholders
Let’s dive into the highlights of Danny’s insights on overcoming stakeholder management challenges. Here are the key points:
Understand what stakeholders care about: Focus on what drives them.
Context is everything: Set the stage for productive conversations.
Seek the best answer, not your answer: Collaborate to build alignment.
Speak their language: Tailor your communication to each stakeholder group.
Practice empathy: Prepare for stakeholder reactions and objections.
Understand What Stakeholders Care About
Danny emphasises that one of the most important steps in influencing stakeholders is understanding what drives them. He points out that, at their core, every executive and decision-maker is motivated by two fundamental things: they want the business to grow and customers to be happy.
“Every executive I’ve encountered, no matter their role, wants customers to be happy and the business to grow,” Danny explained. “It’s hard to argue with those two things. If you focus on aligning your message to these goals, you're more likely to get buy-in.”
Product leaders frequently encounter roadblocks when they frame conversations solely around their own objectives for the product. To truly influence stakeholders, it’s crucial to shift your approach. By aligning your initiatives with the company’s overarching goals and the specific incentives of individual stakeholders, you can foster collaboration and drive buy-in. This strategic pivot not only enhances your credibility but also positions your proposals as integral to the organisation’s success, making it easier to navigate challenges and secure support.
Context is Everything
Danny believes that many stakeholder conversations can go off track because people aren't on the same page from the start. He suggests that by setting the right context, everyone can enjoy more productive discussions.
“I’ve walked into conversations and just jumped right into it, only to realise 10 minutes in that we were on totally different pages,” Danny shared. “You have to set the stage. Share the context you have, and ask for the context others might have. That way, you can avoid confusion and wasted time.”
Danny recommends beginning every key conversation by concisely laying out the context. What’s the current state of the project? What do the stakeholders need to know? What information might they be missing? Creating a shared understanding will increase the chances of making a mutual decision more quickly.
Seek the Best Answer, Not Your Answer
Over the years, Danny has embraced a significant shift in his approach: focusing on finding the best solution, rather than pushing his own ideas. Early in his career, he was often eager to persuade stakeholders to agree with his proposals. But he soon realised that this approach often met with resistance.
“My goal is to arrive at the best answer in every conversation, not my answer,” Danny said. “When you focus on finding the best answer, you bring people along with you rather than just trying to sell them on your solution.”
This mindset shift allows for more collaboration and reduces the friction of forcing a specific agenda. Instead of digging in your heels, Danny advises product leaders to approach stakeholder conversations willing to listen, adapt, and collectively refine ideas.
Speak Their Language
One of the most important skills in managing stakeholders is learning how to communicate in a way that connects with different groups. Product leaders often work with teams from engineering, marketing, sales, and finance—each with their own goals, priorities, and ways of speaking. Danny emphasised how crucial it is to adjust your communication style to fit each audience, making sure everyone feels heard and understood.
“The language of sales is different from the language of engineering, and operations speak a different language than marketing,” Danny explained. “You have to adapt and speak their language to be effective.”
Understanding the concerns and vocabulary of each stakeholder group helps bridge gaps and ensures that your message lands the way you intend. For example, while you might focus on customer experience and roadmaps with the engineering team, the sales team will want to hear about timelines and how the product will help close deals.
Practice Empathy
One of Danny's most practical pieces of advice is to actively prepare for how stakeholders might react to your proposals. He believes this level of preparation helps anticipate objections and ensures you come to the conversation ready to address concerns.
“For critical conversations, I sit down and think about what the person’s reaction is going to be,” Danny said. “I practice responses for different scenarios. It’s not about scripting, but thinking through objections and preparing for a productive conversation.”
By anticipating your stakeholders' needs and concerns, you can be more agile in your responses and more persuasive in your arguments.
The Right Kind of Empathy
In my coaching experience, I have seen the central role of empathy in stakeholder management, but it’s vital to operate with the right kind of empathy. Many product leaders fall into the trap of emotional empathy, where they become overly invested in how stakeholders feel. They feel the same emotions and try to cater to those emotions. While emotional empathy can help build relationships, it’s not the most effective tool for influencing decisions.
Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is about understanding someone else’s perspective without getting caught up in their emotions. It’s about putting yourself in the stakeholder’s shoes and thinking about the situation from their point of view.
It’s less about feeling what they feel and more about understanding their concerns and motivations so you can help address them. If your background is product management, then you have the discovery skills to understand your stakeholders. In sales, the consultative phase is also called discovery, if you are unsure what makes your stakeholder tick, ask questions and listen.
Cognitive empathy is the sweet spot for product leaders because it allows you to stay objective while still being attuned to your stakeholders' needs. It also allows you to foresee challenges and navigate tough conversations without being clouded by emotional responses.
A Question to Consider
Danny’s advice underscores the complexity of stakeholder management but also offers a clear path forward: understand what stakeholders care about, set the right context, collaborate on finding the best solutions, and practice cognitive empathy.
As you reflect on these insights, ask yourself: How well do you really understand your organisation's stakeholders? Do you know what drives them, and are you aligning your efforts with their priorities?
In product leadership, your ability to influence stakeholders can make or break your success and the product's success. Assess how effectively you're managing those relationships and consider where you might need to adjust your approach.