10 Books to improve your Stakeholder Management game as a Product Manager

Being a Product Manager demands you to be a master of all trades! Even though the job description is not standardised across companies, countries or products, one most vital skill expected from a PM of any level of seniority is Stakeholder Management.

Unlike other expected skills such as Product Analytics, building Product Metrics, Competitor Analysis, etc. Stakeholder Management is a soft-skill, and it is harder to pick up soft skills as compared to hard skills.

As someone coming from a hard sciences background, I was used to learning the theory first and then applying it. And science had taught me that the same inputs always led to the same outputs. However, in my job as a PM, each stakeholder was different, and the same communication did not work for everyone.

I also started facing inter-cultural issues when I went from working for an all-Indian team in an Indian company, to a team of Russians, Germans, Turkish, Egyptians, Japanese, French and Italians in a German company.

Soon, I was overwhelmed. What worked for one stakeholder was not working for the other. Within the same stakeholder group, what worked for one individual was not working for the other. I needed to have a better operational plan to communicate and align with my stakeholders.

In a state of panic, I reached out to my manager. After some discussions with him, and some retrospection, I listed out all the skills required to build a strong stakeholder management operations plan. In the process of doing so, I learnt that one can pick up these soft-skills by reading books!

Important Skills for Stakeholder Management

Self-management:

Managing stakeholders is a very energy intensive task. It occupies a lot of your mental bandwidth and a lot of space on you calendar. Owing to the demanding role you fulfil, it is important to manage yourself since no one manages your time or your mental well-being for you. A great book for this is No Bullsh*t Leadership. It has a whole chapter dedicated to self-management. It guides on how you can prioritise your tasks and meetings, how you can manage your time better and even how you can manage your stress and mental balance. A great book, a must read!

Managing your priorities becomes essential when you have limited time and multiple stakeholder groups to cater to. There are many steps to do this: using a prioritisation framework to identify the urgent and important tasks and everything else. Them, identify tasks that ONLY YOU can do, and those that you can delegate.

Setting Boundaries

As a PM you may have the urge to finish tasks so they are not lying around and cause panic in the last minute. However, you set yourself up for failure the moment you think you are responsible for all tasks. You need to be aware of the difference between responsible and accountable. As a PM, you need to know what tasks you are accountable for (you don’t need to do them hands-on, but if it isn’t delivered as promised, you are answerable), and which ones you are responsible for (the ones you need to do with your own hands).

Moreover, it is important to understand how tasks need to be split between you and other members of the development team.

How to Lead in Product Management gives the guidance on this aspect of Product Management. There are very practical tips on how and how frequently schedule meetings for different stakeholder groups, and for what purpose, how to include them in product discussions and decisions, and so many more. If you ever thought you needed some handholding or a guideline to do these things flawlessly, then this book is for you!

Inter-personal Management:

This is the most crucial, and still the toughest part of stakeholder management. Underneath their designations, roles and responsibilities, you need to be mindful that you are talking to people. And every person brings their biases and cultural baggage to the table when they come down to do business with you. Hence, the key to a successful conversation with your stakeholder is knowing their cultural background.

When I say culture, I do not mean what each stakeholder practices at their home, but the culture of the country in which they have worked. For example, I have lived all my life in India and started my career in an Indian company with majority of my stakeholders being Indians. The Indian context of hierarchy is very strong. You listen to your boss, she listens to her boss and so on. But in my new German company, there is a strong push for consensus. Your boss needs to get a buy-in from you and her other stakeholders in order to take a decision.

Not knowing this drastic shift in decision making cultures, I was flustered each time anyone from my new team challenged my decisions. “Because I said so” would no longer work!

There are multiple ways in which you work can be different from your stakeholder’s. One is the dimension of decision making. Another could be emotion, separation of personal and professional life, etc.

The most definitive guide to understand these differences and craft your communication strategy is The Culture Map.

This books actually changed my life. Before, I was constantly irritated with the constant deluge of questions and non-cooperation. But later, I realised that it was more about inclusivity and clarity of instruction. This reduce my frustrations, and made my preparations for each meeting more focused.

Communication Skills:

A great big part of stakeholder management is to be able to be able to effortlessly influence them. Influence is a very elusive tactic. Understanding how to create and wield it is a complex concept. But the book Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki breaks it down into digestible bites. It talks about what adds to the power of influencing your teammates, your customers, stakeholders, etc.

It gives examples from Apple when it was still a fledgeling, where Guy was responsible for marketing the newly released Macintoshes in the 1980’s. It gives specific actionable tips on how to influence as a product manager.

Dealing with Difficult People:

Often, as a Product Manager, you might find yourself having critical conversations with “difficult people”. Difficult doesn’t mean rude, but people who are either extremely critical, impatient or hard to please. It could even be people who are always stressed out or who overwork themselves.

They might be stars in their teams, but certain habits or qualities make them difficult partners to work with. Harvard Business Review published a collection of essays on various habits and traits and how to deal with them.

If in any case, you are one of those people with the qualities mentioned in the essays, the book is still helpful since you can see the impact of your habits on the work environments through a third party’s eyes. It helps with self management as well!

Managing difficult stakeholders needs you to make sure that you stay calm under difficult conversations and understand their emotional background. You need to pick a tone and a communication style that does not put you across as impatient, intolerant or defensive. Marshall Rosenberg came up with a framework to break down an inter-personal conversation in a way that neutralises the tone of the conversation and gets the message out clearly.

This helps ether you are on the giving end or the receiving end. It helps you how to craft your communication, as well as how to react to someone.

Books that go the Extra Mile

Radical Candor: This book by Kim Scott is all about how to give feedback to a team member or a colleague in a way that it helps them grow without damaging your professional relationship. This is very useful to Product Managers, who often have to deal with a difficult development team. Like they say, what differentiates a good PM from a great PM is her ability to say NO effectively. And for this, this book is your best friend!

Hit Refresh: This book about Satya Nadella’s experience changing the culture of Microsoft from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset may appear to be a tangent, but he has many nuggets of wisdom to offer around motivating a team, setting a common vision, creating a growth mindset and achieving a collective goal.

Roadmaps Relaunched: Don’t be fooled by the title of the book. It is not just about nailing product roadmaps. This book ties together other product responsibilities such as understanding customer needs, value propositioning, stakeholder communication etc. with the impact they have on the quality of your roadmap, and the speed at which you may get a buy-in. I am sad I stumbled on this book late in my product career!

The KPI Checklist: This is another gem of a book I discovered a little late in my PM journey. Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are what help you check the health of you product from time to time. They are quantifiable measures of success of ‘why you built the product’ in the first place. This book introduced the concept of KPI trees. A KPI tree consists of various branches, each being a component of the main success criterion you want to measure. Splitting the success measure into its components helps you figure out what actually is a reasonable KPI to track. Another reason this is helpful is that it gives the PM a clear understanding of which components make sense to which stakeholder group and create the dashboards accordingly.

The book uses a practical example to help drive the concepts home. It is an amazing book for both beginners and pros.

Conclusion

Being a Product Manager requires you to juggle many balls at once. Stakeholder management is the most rudimentary and yet the most elusive of the skills. Mastering it takes not only a strategy but also practice and experience.

The books I have listed above share experiences from various industry leaders and seniors, from whose experience we can benefit. All the books teach us also about how we can manage your emotions, and, ultimately, remember that this is purely business, and not personal.

Let me know your strategies for strengthening your stakeholder management skills.