[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Stakeholder Communication

[00:00:00] Megan Saker: So welcome everyone to October’s ProdPad webinars. Today, Janna is going to be talking about how to keep your senior stakeholders informed without the headaches.

So this is about how to streamline your communication, specifically up, reporting up to senior stakeholders and the leadership team. in such a way that it’s far less heavy lifting and time for you and will give them everything they want without you having to field endless follow up questions. So this is the most efficient way to proactively update senior stakeholders on what is happening in product, so keeping them informed. So it builds trust and telling the story. Yeah. And telling the story of what is going on in product. So, yeah, that’s what we’re going to be talking about just before I hand over to Janna. Let me just explain very briefly a bit about ProdPad. If you are new to ProdPad webinars or you are not a ProdPad customer at the moment, let me just explain who we are and what we do.

So ProdPad is a product management tool, a complete All in one platform that provides product teams and product managers with a centralized hub for all their product work. So there are three core areas of ProdPad. There is a roadmapping tool to help you manage, communicate and publish and prioritize your product roadmaps and portfolio roadmaps. There is an idea management system, which allows you to manage, prioritize, collaborate around your idea backlog. And then there is feedback capture that allows you to capture customer feedback from multiple sources and from internally as well from your teammates and colleagues.

Thanks for that. And to be able to bring that into ProdPad, there are AI tools that will help you analyze that feedback, and then you use that to inform your product decision making. ProdPad also has the most mature AI assistance and AI capabilities of any product management software. So if you want to check those out, you can start a free trial of ProdPad, or indeed, Just say demo in the chat and I’ll make Rich here will reach out to you and he can organize a quick call to show you around and show you what I can do for you.

So that is ProdPad. Now let me introduce you to Janna. So Janna is a product management guru, inventor of the Now-Next-Later roadmap, a co founder of Mind the Product, and co founder and CEO here at ProdPad. So, Janna, And her co founder Simon created ProdPad to solve the product problems and challenges that they were facing in their product management jobs.

So, Janna has been there, lived through all these problems, and so is a great person to help us understand what the solutions are. So, Janna. 

[00:03:14] Janna Bastow: Hey, thank you so much for the warm intro and good to see everybody here. I see some some familiar faces. I see some new faces. So this is great. Awesome to be here and thanks for for setting this up.

So, this is a topic that we’re covering because it’s just one of these things that comes up so often, it’s the thing that people talk about and ask about and, we’re all. Constantly asking about how they communicate to their stakeholders, and particularly the talking about to their execs.

So, what we’re going to be covering today, we’re going to talk about. Well, how do you know who are your senior stakeholders? What matters most to them? And, how to tailor your updates to fit that. their priorities. And then we’re going to talk about how to craft effective updates for them that reduce follow up questions and save you time.

Make sure everyone’s aligned with your product goals. We’re also going to highlight some key metrics to that are going to help you demonstrate impact and align with your company strategy. Make sure that your updates are really meaningful. And then we’re also going to talk about how to customize your stakeholder reviews.

And make sure that what you’re delivering is really relevant to every stakeholder that you’re talking to. And then we’re going to talk about handling feedback and those communications really proactively by capturing, responding and closing the loop on that stakeholder input. And this is really about building trust and reducing ongoing questions.

So, again, some of that’s about saving you some time and some of your sanity as well. So this is all about streamlining stakeholder communication, building alignment saving some of your time and really allowing you to focus more on what matters most in product management. So how does that sound? Are we ready for this?

All right, let’s kick off. So before diving into how to keep senior stakeholders informed, we really want to understand who they are and what matters to them. So it’s all about knowing your audience. So senior stakeholders, who are we talking about? It’s whether it’s founders, CEOs, CPOs, they’re all busy individuals who need high level info that connects to that bigger picture.

They care about strategic alignment, hard numbers, usually business growth, that sort of stuff, rather than the granular day to day tasks, even though they might be. be jumping down your neck to get that information to we know that story. So by understanding their motivations, you can start tailoring your updates to resonate with them and reduce unnecessary questions and build trust.

So diving in, we’re talking about senior stakeholders. We’re referring to high level decision makers, like founders, CEOs, CPOs, VPs of product. And sometimes your senior sales or even other revenue commercial bodies, it might be your investors. There’s a bunch of different senior stakeholders that you might be dealing with a whole plethora of them, a whole zoom of them, of course.

And they’re probably packed they’ve got packed schedules. And they’re juggling multiple responsibilities and different priorities and they’ve got different motivations and their focus is. The bigger picture, but also their particular big picture. So, it’s hard to say exactly what they’re looking at, but generally it’s going to be around things like business growth and market share and strategic alignment.

So they’re not going to be likely diving into the nitty gritty details of the day to day product tasks. They might be. But they shouldn’t be there. There should be looking at those bigger picture things. So understanding this is really key because it influences how we communicate with them. The, our updates ideally should be concise and relevant and linked to the business outcomes linked to what it is that matters to them.

They don’t want to get lost in the weeds. And of course, if you give them something to do. To detail, they will get lost in those day to day product task stuff, where you probably don’t want them to get lost into. They need to know that the products on track and that the work aligns with the company’s overarching goals.

So. It’s really important to focus on what matters most to them. So at this level they’re looking for hard numbers, metrics that demonstrate progress and the impact of your product initiatives. They want to see evidence of strategic alignment, meaning they need to understand how your work ties into the company’s overall goals and priorities.

So business growth is another really key focus area. Stakeholders care about outcomes that drive revenue and increase market share or improve customer satisfaction, things like that. So it’s important to link your updates to these sort of business imperatives, these sort of outcomes to show that you’re contributing to the bigger picture.

And they need reassurance. They want to feel confident that the team is aligned with the company’s direction and has commercial acumen to prioritize what’s most important. So, bye. Addressing these priorities, you’re going to build trust and reduce the number of follow up questions.

And, basically, the primary motivation is reassurance. They need to know that the team is focused on the right priorities, and that the efforts align with the company’s strategic direction. They want that alignment. They want to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals, especially when different departments are involved in the product development process.

They want to have visibility into progress. They need to have a clear understanding of how the product is advancing and how it supports the broader objectives. So it’s not just about what you’re doing, it’s about you demonstrating how your work contributes to the overall vision. And of course, risk management is a really big factor.

This is something that comes up time and time again. They want to reduce uncertainty by staying informed about key initiatives and potential challenges, any blockers. So you’ve got to keep these motivations in mind so you can tailor your updates and, build confidence with your stakeholders and show that you’re addressing the right priorities.

And of course, the things that you want to avoid, you don’t want to give them overly granular details or technical specifics, right? You don’t want to overwhelm them and distract them. From that bigger picture, you want to keep the focus on this higher level progress and strategic impact. You want to probably stay away from things that are too static or, slides that need updating constantly.

They become outdated and people end up, holding it up saying, well, this is what your slide said last week when you could actually give them something more dynamic that presents more up to date information with less effort. You also want to give them context. So giving them a feature list without any context is not helpful, right?

You need to be able to explain why something matters and how it ties back to the business’s strategic priorities. And lastly, avoid any sort of unstructured updates, information should always be clear, concise, and directly linked to strategic goals. It keeps your communication focused and ensures that your stakeholders get the insights they need without any unnecessary noise.

So to sum up, what you’re looking for, they’re your senior stakeholders. They’re high level decision makers who care about outcomes, strategic alignment, and business growth. They’re motivated by Reassurance and visibility, not by granular details or static reports. What you’re trying to do is build trust and reduce questions.

So, with this in mind, I want to start talking about how we can craft updates to keep them informed while cutting down on the time that you spend on reporting.

So, in this, we’re going to cover four principles, or four areas for creating effective updates. So, one I want to talk about is the importance of a golden thread to link updates to strategy and evidence. And actually curious anybody here ever use the term golden thread? And when I talk about it, let me know if it resonates with you.

I’ve been hearing it come up over and over again, so I’m trying to see if it’s something that’s used more widely, or if it’s just something that’s becoming popular now. All right, new to some people, but I think some people have heard of it. Yeah, maybe. All right. Well, let’s make it a thing.

All right. We’ll talk about it in a second. All right. We’re also going to talk about showing the why, which hopefully we have heard about this concept. I’m talking about using dynamic tools to keep information up to date and reaffirming the vision, right? Tying everything back to the vision. So start with the first one the golden thread.

So, this is about linking your communication to evidence, right? To the strategy to the outcomes that are important to the business, right? So it’s being able to support your decisions with. information around what’s important to the business. So being able to say, if our goals are this and our strategy is this, and this work is happening, can you say that it’s happening because of this, and because of this, it’s all tied through with a thread, a golden thread that you can follow through.

And that way, if there’s any tactical work happening, you can follow that thread up and you can see why it’s happening. What goal. It’s tied to. And things like OKRs help with this because they’re cascading and they help you tie things back up. But really what you’re doing is you should be thinking about the work that you’re doing and the updates you’re giving as a narrative.

You’re talking about how the work that you’re doing is helping to keep you on track with the broader strategy keep you on track with the broader business objectives. Stakeholders should be able to see that bigger picture and understand the strategic impact of. the work that you’re doing, even down to the more tactical stuff.

So this is actually something that I care a lot about because it actually is where BroadPad is it’s developed, right? If before I started using the word golden thread, it was this concept of being able to connect the work that I was doing to The work that was important to the business, because otherwise people would think that, the stuff that I’m doing is just, happening because I made it up in my corner, which obviously wasn’t true.

I want to be able to tie back, we’re doing this experiment because it should help us hit this particular goal. I should be able to follow that through. And so, What you should be able to do is use ProdPad to reinforce that thread. So you should be able to link any updates to the objectives or to the OKRs.

Link your initiatives on your roadmap to the objectives or to the experiment that’s going to help solve it. Link all that work to the feedback that supports it. So this is just one view in ProdPad. There’s different views all over the place, but this is my favorite view because it allows you to say, here’s all this stuff we’re working on.

But let’s filter it down by the stuff that’s going to hit this particular objective. That’s what we’re looking at in this view. So you can see some quick wins some that we have lots of confidence in, they’re bright green, some that we don’t have lots of confidence in, they’re red but they’re all filtered by a particular objective.

These are the ones that are going to get us money. So you can just follow that thread through and go, if we’re looking to make money and that’s our North Star objective, then here’s the things that we’re working on. And that’s why these ones are on the roadmap and those ones over there are not. And I think somebody Francesco is saying in the the chat it’s all about narrative storytelling which, it strikes to the heart of what product management is very much about, I think, is about that that storytelling, and that carries us through to this next version, which is the showing the why behind your updates.

It’s not just a list about what it’s not just listing what you’re working on, it’s explaining the impact, connecting the initiatives to specific goals, whether that’s increasing revenue or improving satisfaction or expanding market share or whatever it is that your business wants.

It’s to show your stakeholders that your work is focused on driving meaningful outcomes. So you want to be able to demonstrate that alignment and emphasize. The outcomes emphasize. what it is that you hope it’s going to deliver and what it is that it actually delivers. And again, this strikes at where ProdPad comes in.

And again, this is something that it’s been doing from the very beginning. It’s a tool that helps you track the why on your roadmap. So, very early in ProdPad’s history, we implemented this concept of being able to say, Here’s the higher level initiative as opposed to the feature you’re building.

Here’s the higher level initiative. And here’s the why, as in the objective, the goal for the business that you’re trying to tackle, and then connected to that would be, the supporting evidence and the ideas and the feedback and the other things like that. So again, it’s saying, well, we’re working on this because.

We want to hit this goal, but also here’s some other stuff that backs it up. And so it’s telling that story. It’s connecting those dots. It’s being able to show that through and showing these pieces to your stakeholders can make a really big difference. You’re not just building stuff because they wanted to see it on the roadmap or because you wanted to see on the roadmap.

You’re building it because it helps stack up to this bigger picture. That’s going to help you become. The X or Y and hit these goals.

And really what’s going to help you here is to use tools that automatically keep this information up to date, right? The last thing you want to do is have a space that you constantly have, like a, A PowerPoint that you constantly have to update what you want is something that automatically keeps this information up to date with what’s going on in the background so that your stakeholders can go in and check on it themselves and give you that real time visibility, allowing stakeholders to check.

Progress on their own whenever they need to. And this reduces the number of questions that they have and gives them confidence that they’re always seeing the latest information as well. And frankly saves you time as a product person. So you don’t have somebody coming to tap you on the shoulder saying, where’s, where is this?

And is this in progress? So in ProdPad world, this looks like something like this and there’s lots of different variations of this, but on the roadmap, you can see, That you’ve got your bigger picture objective. You’ve got a stack of different ideas or experiments that are in flight and you can see where they sit in development.

So this is the more tactical work and it’s automatically updated based on where it’s sitting in that flow. So the team is working on. This work, it’s moving it through the workflow and it’s even synced through with tools like Azure DevOps, or in this case, this one synced with Jira. And so as it’s worked on in Jira, it’ll update back in broad bed.

So it’s just keeping everything up to date. And I’ll talk a little bit more about reports as well in a little bit as well. It’s really important to be able to show information in lots of different formats.

And other really key thing is to constantly reaffirm the product vision, keep the vision front and center and all of your updates. So make it a habit to tie your comms, any of your updates back to this higher level vision to show how initiatives support the company’s long term goals.

So it helps stakeholders see the connection between your day to day work and that bigger picture. It also helps make sure that the rest of the team knows what your vision is and reinforces it, little test for you. Go round your team and just ask them individually, maybe on Slack or in person or whatever, and just say, what is our vision?

And I guarantee they’re all going to give you a different version of it. Make sure that you’ve got your vision in front of them. Put it somewhere central where they can access it and make sure you bring it up in regular communications so that delta between what different people on the team say gets smaller so that they’re more likely to talk about the same vision.

They’re all supposed to be on the same page. And so, really, what you should be doing is making sure that you’ve got everybody on the same page with this vision. If there’s significant changes in the market, if new insights arise, then you can refine that vision and keep it relevant but make sure that you’re communicating any updates to avoid confusion and make sure everybody’s on the same page.

And that’s the really key thing is to keep it all in a page. And so this is where ProdPad helps, is that you can display the roadmap the product vision right alongside, your active daily work, which is your roadmaps and your other updates. So make sure that the vision is always accessible and at top of mind for your team and everyone in your team.

And, all of your stakeholders so that they can see this and take advantage of it.

Mike had a great example in the chat. He just said that he’s put his product vision in his zoom background. So whenever anyone sees him, they see the vision. I love that. I might adopt that. I like really like that. Thanks for the example, Mike, and thanks for the suggestion. All right, so, I want to talk about some common mistakes.

Some of these are include using static documents and, creating more work for yourself and just ending up with outdated information and version control headaches or overloading stakeholders with too many details or not connecting those updates to the strategy. or ignoring stakeholder specific needs, right?

If you deliver a one size fits all update, it can miss the mark. So think about what matters to each stakeholder, whether it’s particular metrics that they care about, whether it’s particular area of progress that they care about, any specific initiatives that they care about tailor that communication to them.

Think about what it is that they are looking to understand and Graphed your message around them.

All right. So, just to to sum those up, we talk about, we talked about the golden thread to link your your work through this thread. We talked about making sure to show the why, showing that your work aligns with business goals and your OKRs using dynamic tools to keep everything up to date and to always tie everything back to the vision.

Next, I want to talk about key metrics.

So, really key here is to focus on the metrics that matter the most at a more strategic level. I know it’s really easy to get lost in the day to day product metrics, but we’re talking about the metrics that your leaders care about. To talk a little bit about outcome oriented metrics, and then we’re going to talk about why it’s really important to link your metrics to initiatives.

So some essential metrics things like, these are very commercial focused things, right? So some suggestions here, your growth metrics, whether the product is driving the business forward, is this revenue growth, user acquisition rates user expansion. Things like that. There’s customer retention, like how well you’re keeping your customers, your users engaged.

It might be things like churn rate, customer lifetime value daily active users or other things around repeat usage, those types of things can really drive the growth. Important underlying business metrics OKR progress. So if you’re tracking those OKRs back to what’s important to the business, then show how well your objectives and the key results are being met and your market share can show your competitive positioning.

They want to know how your competitor, sorry, how your product compares to the market, whether you are making gains. And then also I want to talk about outcome oriented metrics. So, want to talk about whether you’re showing metrics that align with your strategic goals. So it’s not just about any metrics, but, is revenue growth important for your business, or is it all about expanding into new markets or keeping existing clients?

So, these should be things that focus on your business’s specific goals for their results. Not just any numbers, but their particular numbers, their context. So, and remember that these metrics should always tell a story. Don’t just present numbers, provide context and explain what trends mean for the business.

Are you seeing consistent growth in a certain segment? Is there a dip that needs addressing? What you’re trying to do is give a clearer picture of the product impact on the company’s success. And then I also want to talk about linking those metrics to specific product initiatives.

So I always see that there’s this piece missing, this missing link between what it is that we want to measure and what it is that we actually do. And so I see OKRs is like the flip side of your roadmap, and that’s how it’s presented in BroadPad. The two are intrinsically connected. And so you should connect the two together and say, well, we’re trying to move this particular metric.

Here’s the thing that we’re going to do in order to make that happen. Or this thing that we’re trying to do is to move this metric. The two should only happen side by side. What I often see are teams that end up having, their metrics or their OKRs over in one space and the road map over in another space.

And they only go check on their metrics, their OKRs. once a month or so when they’re asked to present on them, but they do their product work on a daily basis. Cause that’s what fills their day. And the twos tend to drift apart. So, what you want to do is link these two together and back up your claims with evidence as well.

So use data to show how specific. Initiatives are likely to move the needle. So what your target outcomes are and what your actual outcomes are for any particular metric, and then monitor them over time. So actually go back and track what worked and what didn’t work for what happened. Don’t just ship stuff.

Don’t just do initiatives. Don’t just get in experiments out there, but actually go back and identify what’s working well and where adjustments might be needed.

All right. So, next I want to talk about customizing the way we communicate with each stakeholder.

So, as I said at the beginning, your senior stakeholders are going to have different personas. So your CEO is going to have different needs than your Investor or board advisor who’s going to have different needs than your CRO or CMO who’s going to have different needs again from your CPO.

Right. They’re all going to have different sets of needs. And so you really want to think about how you tailor that content based on their unique priorities. You want to make sure that you’re highlighting relevant metrics and goals to show alignment with their company objectives, and you want to use dynamic filters to let stakeholders focus on the data that’s most relevant to them.

So, starting with tailoring content for example, like a CEO might care about growth metrics like revenue, the CPO might be more interested in specific feature progress or customer satisfaction, or the CXO might care about that, right? So think about what matters most to each role and you’re saving you and them time and you’re eliminating noise so they don’t have to rifle through as much.

And to find out what they care about, treat it like customer discovery, stakeholder discovery. You ask them questions about what they care about and then spend that time to figuring out what they need and then streamline what you deliver to them. Streamline that communication to include only what’s relevant.

And you can use ProdPad to tailor that content. So one of my favorite pieces is the fact that you can customize your published roadmaps. So basically you use ProdPad for managing your underlying set of roadmaps, but then you can basically create any number of different versions, cuts of those roadmaps.

So you might say, well, for my CPO, I want to create a road version of my roadmap that looks like this and has this level of information and detail for my CEO. I want to send this one for my, head of data and analytics. I want to show this, for my public facing roadmap, I want to show this.

And it’s all powered by the same version underneath. But it allows you to highlight the things that matter most to certain stakeholders but you only have to keep one roadmap up to date. It’s really magical. And so you also want to make sure that you’re highlighting the metrics and goals that align with the business objectives that are, are important to your senior stakeholders.

So, you want to show how those metrics align with their business objectives and the ones that they care about. So, you want to show how things are progressing. To the goals that they care about show about, talk about how things are actually moving forward, talk about what’s actually progressed since last time talk about any sort of particular goals that they are looking to track any sort of objectives that matter, particularly for the stakeholder.

So it allows you to keep the conversation really focused on what matters to them and keeps the conversation around that particular area of the business so that you can control that conversation more. And again, this is something that you can easily do in prod pad. You can point them to, let’s say, the one.

Objective that’s that they’re talking about and then say, well, here’s where we are. And here’s what’s on track. Here’s what’s up behind. And here’s the things that are happening. The different initiatives that are that are tied to that and the progress that we’re making on those particular things.

So it makes it really easy to have those conversations around specific goals or specific objectives that might be important to certain different stakeholders.

And then the other really key thing is to give some of this control to your stakeholders to go find this information themselves, right? So, allow your stakeholders to go in and focus on data that’s relevant to their interests, right? So, you should be able to Give access to your information, right?

What’s going on in your space and allow them to filter down and basically say, well, here’s what I’m looking for here. And here’s what I’m looking for here. What we’ve done in prod pad land is created filters. So you can say, well, this is what’s important for the sales team. Here’s what’s important for the CRO.

Here’s what’s important for the CEO. And you can save these filters and point them directly to that space where they can go, say, the ideas or the initiatives or the objectives that match those particular things. Or they can go and explore and see what’s going on in other spaces as well. So it’s a self service approach that that allows stakeholders to get information that they need without relying on waiting for the next report or relying on, again, coming to tap you on the shoulder or ask you for updates in Slack or Teams or wherever it is that they, they come find you.

So, again, this is all about tailoring your content, making sure that you are highlighting the stuff that’s important to them. As particularly things that are important to their strategic goals and metrics, and then giving space for them to filter stuff down to jump to their view, but also giving them access to other information so that they can see what’s going on in the broader picture.

And following on with that idea, I’m a really big fan of empowering self service. Right. I am a big believer that the team is it’s not just the product person who does the product management. It’s the wider product team. And it’s the product manager’s job to work with the team and pull out those insights and keep the team informed about what’s going on with the product management system, as opposed to the product manager themselves, having all the answers and just.

Sitting in their corner or, in, in what’s considered a black box and just making the decisions themselves. So I’m a really big fan of making the product management system more transparent so that people come to trust the product manager. So people come to trust the product management team and the product management process.

And so one of those ways that you can really start. Gaining that trust is to make the product management process more accessible and to make it more self service. So make it so that people can find answers on their own. If they want to know what’s on the roadmap, they want to know whether there’s any experiments that line up with this thing, that’s going to help solve this problem, they should go find that information.

If they want to know whether this feedback they’ve picked up and put in, gave to you, is being worked on, or whether it’s, fallen by the wayside because other more important things happened, they should be able to get that information. So, big fan of being able to give them accessible tools and giving them access to this in various ways.

So, one way is to just make sure simplifying. Stakeholder access, right? Give them access to your space where you’re doing your product management work. Make it sure that it’s somewhere that’s intuitive that, doesn’t feel like it’s a developer tool. That doesn’t feel like it’s a hindrance to make use of.

So don’t go with anywhere that’s too over engineered. You’re looking for somewhere that’s a user friendly interface. Obviously big fan of ProdPad for this because what it’s got is it’s designed for the wider team is not designed for the dev team and the product team is designed for the wider company to make sense of so that people can go in and see where their ideas have ended up.

They can see what’s on the roadmap. They can see progress on things without getting lost. And then also you want to make it easy to automate your regular updates, right? So, the last thing you want to do is spend lots and lots of time creating manual reports and digging out information.

When reports are updated, When updates are automated, you can make sure that stakeholders are getting the information that they’re not missing a beat, that they’re reminded to go check on various things, and also it can be a call to action to get information from them as well.

Because remember, you’re using them for discovery work and to understand what their motivations and what their problems are as well. So I recommend scheduling regular updates and scheduling regular follow ups. So you keep your stakeholders informed in a predictable, timely way and that way it’s consistency.

You’re looking to build trust and let stakeholders know that they’ll have access to fresh information at regular intervals. And again, you’re looking to make sure that they don’t think that black hole, that sorry, that product management is this black hole where decisions get made. By themselves, and their suggestions and ideas go to die.

And so again, ProdPad can really help with this. Lots of different views in ProdPad, but one of my favorites now is the reporting. This is a newer area that allows you to keep everybody informed of progress and work, right? This is just one view here where it’s basically showing which of your OKRs are on track or have been missed or are behind based on the progress on them and allows you to quickly pull this, drop it into your report and send it off, right?

So just making that so much easier. And then also you want to make sure that you’re creating real time access. So again, opening up the space where you’re doing product management, but also assuming that not everybody is going to go and log into your product management space, right? Like with ProdPad, we assumed from the very get go that everyone’s getting, your team’s going to have a login to ProdPad, but not everyone’s going to log into ProdPad on a daily basis, right?

We’re not kidding ourselves. That’s where the product people are every day, but the rest of the team, where are you? Are you in Slack? Are you in Teams? I think that’s really interesting. We’d love to see that. Are you guys in Slack or Teams? Let me know in the chat. But basically The point is that your teams are going to be there.

So you want to find ways to interact with them in the tools that they’re in, right? And I’ve just assumed Slack or Teams, like you want Slack or Teams. Are you into something else as well? Is there anything new out there? I assume it’s one of the two. Anyways, but you seem that your teams are in these places having these conversations back and forth.

And so, put your out updates in those spaces, right? Get your ProdPad connected in to your Slack and your teams so that you can push your updates from ProdPad to Slack and teams. Make it so that you can automatically take your Slack or your team’s conversations and turn them into ideas or feedback in ProdPad.

And make it really easy to pull that stuff through so really key to be able to do that sort of stuff. And also keep your team update with updated with of live data access. Right? So really key to make sure that they know where things are in progress. Right? So if things are.

Being pushed through in the process, make sure that they can see that, right? If they want to know that something is in development, don’t hide that away. Don’t tell them they have to go to Jira, for example, make that visible in your product management space so that they can see that.

So we do that in product pad with the the Jira integration. So everything sinks back in a much easier to use friendly space where they can see it’s in development. Don’t panic. It’ll move forward to done. And the next stage is when it’s actually being, moving forward with development team. So just helps keep everybody in informed in a much more self service approach that supports transparency and, allows you to build trust with your stakeholders.

So yes you want to make sure that you’ve got accessible tools, you automate any updates that you can, and you enable that real time access. And then final bit that I want to talk about is how to proactively address. any sort of stakeholder input.

So, I want to talk about how to use any sort of structured feedback channels to capture input how to document your decisions and rationale to, again, you’re trying to create transparency and trust and accountability for your product team and for the wider team as well. And then closing the loop with your stakeholders to make sure that they feel and formed.

All right. So, making sure that you’re collecting all of your feedback in one place. It’s really, we want to make sure that it’s really easy to pull that stuff in and track and prioritize and take action on it. You probably have feedback and insights all over the place. And so, you want to be able to pull that in from wherever it’s coming from and put that in one place and make it really easy to your stakeholders to get those insights into you.

You don’t want to create barriers for them. You don’t want them to jump through hoops to, find your idea suggestion box in the basement somewhere with 10 different forms they have to fill in. You want to make it really easy for them to be able to suggest stuff. So I was just alluding to this a moment ago, you can have them add ideas and, You can have them email it in.

You can have them in this picture, this is our Slack integration, have them add it via teams, have them add it via browser extension, have them add it lots of different ways, wherever your team or your customers are, you can pull it in and that way, no feedback slips through the cracks and stakeholders can see that their input is being captured as being addressed.

They don’t lose trust in your process. And then also, as you are working away and making decisions and, closing stuff off and saying, well, we are going to work on this one, or we did this, we decided not to do this. There’s just a whole bunch of decisions that come out of the work that you do.

Document that stuff, right? Have a really clear record of why certain choices were made, because I guarantee you, your senior stakeholders, actually all your stakeholders, Eventually you’re going to ask that question going, whatever happened to this? Why did we decide to do this and not this? What happened here?

And so you can use your records as a place to capture Your as a reference point, right down the line, you can say, here’s the decision that was made, right? We had this conversation and then we decided to do this and it doesn’t have to be anything too formal. But really what you’re trying to do is create that accountability, build that trust.

And again, you can use broad pad as a decision log, right? So lots of different places you can do this. You can do it in the discussions area, but also you can use the impact, sorry, the Target an actual outcomes area. I love using the actual outcomes area saying, we thought about doing this thing and this is what we actually got out of it.

So it succeeded or failed or we decided not to do it. And that way you’ve got that record. And if somebody ever goes, whatever happened to that initiative we had on the roadmap. Disappeared from the roadmap. Why is that? You’ve got that record. You’ve got this transparent, accessible trail that stakeholders can refer to whenever they want that context, and it reduces the need for repeated explanations.

And this becomes really powerful, years down the line when, you’ve got somebody new joining who’s wondering what happened or why, something worked a particular way. You’ve just got that record that you can search on and find it and dig it up again. And then really importantly, closing the loop with stakeholders.

So, just show them that their feedback is valued. Make sure that if somebody gives you feedback, send them a quick thanks and then tell them, whether it links up with anything that’s on the roadmap. Provide them updates on progress, getting insights from them is like getting an insight from a customer.

Like it’s an amazing occasion. You want to, pick up on this and close that loop. So, and then use that insight about what they’ve asked for to help you craft your next, um, communication with them. Cause you now know more about what it is that they’re looking for. What’s important to them.

And yeah. So. You can yes, really important with handling feedback and questions, centralize that feedback collection, document those decisions and rationale, and close the loop with stakeholders. So, wanted to wrap up with some key takeaways here. We talked about tailoring communication to fit your stakeholders needs, building transparency, By linking updates to strategic goals, empowering self service to allow stakeholders to access information on their own, and handling feedback proactively by closing the loop and essentially saving you time with all those follow up questions follow up questions that you might have to deal with.

A little takeaway that I want to share with you before we jump into the the questions we have a a presentation deck here. It’s ready made that you can download that we found really helpful for anybody who wants to convince their senior stakeholders to get on board with the now next later.

Is anybody struggling with this now? Or has anybody succeeded with getting their stakeholders on board with NowNextLater? This deck is basically one that you can take, download, edit to make it your own if you want to, but it has all the speaker notes in there already. So it guides you through how to sell your stakeholders on moving to NowNextLater.

And we additionally have a guide. Course here on how to set up and how to convert your timeline roadmap into a now next later roadmap in a way that’s sensitive to your senior stakeholders and meets their needs and expectations. So grab that here or visit ProdPad. com slash downloads at any point, and you can grab that and many more that we have.

And I just want to make sure that you all know about our next webinar, which is coming up which is with James Gunaka, and we’re going to be talking about how to master the jump from product manager to product leader. And that’s going to be on November 7th, same time, same place. And on that note, I can see that there are a million different chat messages, which I won’t be able to go through bit by bit, but I’m going to trust Megan to have read those, and also a couple Q& A.

[00:44:07] Megan Saker: Yeah, so, actually we’ve got a question here from Megan, a different Megan, my Megan. Hi, I’m Megan. Janet. Do you have any specific advice for updating steam senior stakeholders when things are not going so well? Nice question. What do you do? What do you think stakeholders really want to know where initiative is delayed or is not delivering the expected results?

That’s juicy. That’s a nice one. 

[00:44:33] Janna Bastow: Yeah, no, such a good one. Thanks, Megan. And the reality is that they probably want to know the truth, right? The last thing you want to do is obscure the the truth even more and dig yourself deeper, right? If you start sugarcoating stuff sugarcoating it, and then it gets to the end and you realize that, it’s gone really badly you’re just going to end up even deeper in it.

If something isn’t going well you’ve got to sometimes just own up to it and level with them and say, here we’re hoping to be here, we are here, but also don’t just go to them with problems, go to them with, Your suggested next steps, your solutions. Right. Ideally you should go to them with your solutions.

I say that with a grain of salt though because some of the worst advice I ever heard was from a a senior stakeholder of mine who said, don’t ever come to me with problems, only ever come to me with solutions. And what that actually happened, what actually happened was there were some really big problems in the business, and I didn’t always have solutions, and so I just wouldn’t go to him, I didn’t have the, didn’t build that psychological safety to go and flag problems because I didn’t have the solutions to them.

So don’t feel like you have to have the solution, but do be ready or do think of things that you could try to do. But even if it is an insurmountable problem, like, then you definitely probably need to flag it too. Depends on how bad it’s going. But Megan, I hope it’s going all right over there. Don’t worry.

Don’t worry. 

[00:46:14] Megan Saker: But I think that the, as well stakeholders aren’t stupid. They’ve got to wear where they are for a reason, right? So if all they hear is good news stories, yeah, there’s got to having, the occasional failed experiment.

Will add will help them feel confident in your process, because experiments, if you’re doing product management, right, i. e. you have, you are identifying customer problems to solve, you are hypothesizing different ways of solving that you validating those ideas, testing. Measuring results and iterating, if you’re doing that the right way, there will be failed experiments within that, and it is part of the learning, and it’s part of the process, but if you’re working in an agile way, if you’re using lean roadmapping, then you are able to respond to that quickly.

You’re able to move. These weren’t the expected results, but you are able to do that. demonstrating to your senior stakeholders that you have the discipline of making a hypothesis, validating it, testing it, measuring the results, and making decisions accordingly. If you are not ever communicating when things don’t go your way.

Don’t drive the expected results. Then you aren’t illustrating your process effectively to them 

[00:47:40] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely that well said all right. Thank you for the the question there megan. 

[00:47:44] Megan Saker: Yeah, great question. Um, valerie’s asked a quite a specific prod pad question Does prod pad handle a portfolio view so all products can be viewed for specific needs?

So that’s interesting Yeah, like how do you communicate to stakeholders when you are? You of trying to give him a portfolio view. 

[00:48:02] Janna Bastow: Yeah. Great question, Valerie. And yes, you absolutely can. So you can see. individual products. You can group them by product lines or you can group them by entire portfolio view.

So you can see all of your products all at once. And then you can see, within that, you can see everything crunched up into a condensed view, which is probably better for your more senior stakeholders because they don’t care about that level of detail. Or you can get this much more detailed view, which puts a lot of information on that page, but then you can start filtering it down by different things.

So saying, well, show me everything across my entire portfolio That touches the data end of the API or whatever, right. Or that touches the admin section. 

[00:48:44] Megan Saker: Nice. Okay. Um, actually Melissa in the chat has a question. She has been asked to show key changes since the last time stakeholders went in and looked at the dynamic of reporting because sometimes they’ll only go in bi weekly or monthly.

Like, do we have any advice for highlighting what’s new and what’s changed? 

[00:49:07] Janna Bastow: Ah so, first figure out what it is that your stakeholders are looking for. And what you want to then do is make sure that you are giving the right information or right level information, depending on how much they are getting so for a daily update, obviously you don’t want to put too much information in if it’s going to be something like a weekly update, it’s something that they can probably digest over a cup of tea on or a cup of coffee on their Friday morning.

Right. If it’s something that’s happening on a monthly update, it could probably be a sit down, half hour sort of thing where they’re going to digest and then come back to you with information. So think about what needs to be action from it and then what they, what you’re expecting from them on it.

And that should help you decide how much information you go to. The other thing you can do is decide as to whether you give, a taster of information and then say, go here for more information. Right. If you want to see. More on this. Go to this area, right? And ProdPad can be really helpful here where you can say, I know that you’re tracking this objective.

Here’s the highlight of what’s changed, but also if you want to see all the stuff, it’s still here and you can get the live updates and, some stakeholders are going to be in there watching your live updates. Most are probably not. They’ve got live updates from five other direct reports.

[00:50:25] Megan Saker: And I think what’s really important here is not to be tempted to get into a place where you are creating static. updates and reports for them so that they see it at a snapshot of time and then doing an updated version and giving them that so they can compare and contrast because that is just a world of pain for you.

It’s an absolute time sink. You will then have versioning issues left, right and center. They think they’re looking at the most up to date version, but they’re not. They’re looking at the one from however long ago. So yeah, don’t. Don’t think that’s the solution. Absolutely isn’t. In ProdPad, actually, in the reporting tools, you can you can look at the reporting based on particular time periods.

So if they’re only looking in once a month, they could look at the last 30 days each time and see the new update and information, for example. 

[00:51:17] Janna Bastow: Yeah, makes sense. Great. 

[00:51:19] Megan Saker: Do 

[00:51:19] Janna Bastow: we have time for another question? Yeah, Jessie had one in the Q& A and somebody’s thumbed it up. So let’s let’s tackle that one. Let’s 

[00:51:27] Megan Saker: do it.

So do you have any suggestions of what metrics are relevant as a product team that serves internal customers? Right. Yeah, so 

[00:51:37] Janna Bastow: Yeah. Yeah. And actually we work with a lot of internal facing teams. There’s a lot of product management that happens there. So, again, you want to make sure that you’ve got goal alignment and metric alignment within the team.

Or within those metrics that you’re tracking. But there might be things like, well, you can still track user satisfaction. You can still track usage frequency and depth retention or churn of your active users, right? So while you’re not met tracking revenue per se, you can still see how long, how much they’re actually using it.

Also operational efficiency. So things like how long it takes for key tasks. So cycle time for key tasks process improvements or time savings might be something that you can measure error rate reduction. A task percentage, it depends on what the internal tool is trying to do.

But you can get quite specific or be broad with it as well. 

[00:52:27] Megan Saker: Yeah, I think it’s, it can be useful to think about ultimately the customers, the internal customers that you’re serving, like what are they using the tool to do? And somewhere along the line, there’ll be revenue. generation there. So if you’re helping internal people, save time to therefore help them generate more revenue, for example there might be, we’ve got some resources which might help with this are at ProdPad.

com forward slash downloads and within the blog, but there’s a ebook on the downloads area, which is about proving the ROI. Product management. And there, I think specifically for that, there might be some useful metrics and calculations for you to help demonstrate the return that the, your work is doing for the wider business, which might help in that case.

Yeah, wonderful. Excellent. Right, so we are over time now, but thank you so much, Janna. That was fantastic. Just to let everyone know, we will be emailing around the recording once it’s ready along with some links to other related resources. 

[00:53:34] Janna Bastow: So, thank you everybody for your questions, thanks for jumping in on the chat, good to see you all here, and see you back here, as I said, for the next one.

We’ll see you here. Take care.