Product Momentum Podcast 156 / Bruce McCarthy: Prioritizing Stakeholder Objectives Is the Hardest Job in Product
Bruce McCarthy is a renowned product leader at Product Culture, the organization he founded in 2018. He’s also the author of two books: Aligned (2024) and Product Roadmaps Relaunched (2018). Bruce sat down with the Product Momentum team for an in-person chat on the heels of his INDUSTRY Global keynote; our conversation focused on –
- Treating stakeholders as cutomers,
- Understanding/prioritizing stakeholder needs, and
- Bruce’s Stakeholder Canvas, a tool that helps product leaders with stakeholder alignment and prioritization challenges
The bottom line is this: stakeholders are not just peripheral figures in the product development ecosystem, but are central customers whose needs must be meticulously considered in the product manager’s decision-making process.
Stakeholders as Customers
One of the refreshing perspectives Bruce brought to the conversation was the idea of viewing stakeholders as customers. As he explained, “A stakeholder is anybody in your organization whose help and support you need in order for your product…to be successful. [I]t has to be marketed and sold and supported. It has to be financed.”
Think of stakeholders as your extended team who have a stake in the success of your product. In that respect, he adds, “Stakeholders are actually your customers too.”
The Toughest Job in Product: Prioritizing Stakeholder Needs
Product managers learn quickly that they can’t balance stakeholder needs perfectly, ever. “It’s always an art,” Bruce explains. “It’s always a work in progress. It’s always saying ‘no’ to some things in order to say ‘yes’ to other things.”
And that’s why it’s the hardest job in Product. The success of your product hinges on the identification and prioritization of competing stakeholder incentives. To be successful, product managers need to recognize the diversity of interests and influences that various stakeholders bring to the table.
The Stakeholder Canvas
Using the company org chart is one way to help prioritize stakeholder needs, but sometimes (often?), Bruce explains, it can be misleading. It doesn’t always indicate who has the decisionmaker’s ear. You might think it’s the CEO or Head of Product…only to find out for this project, it’s actually the CFO or the Head of Engineering. “The question then becomes, ‘what do you use instead?’”
As Bruce explains, “We developed the stakeholder canvas to help you map out your stakeholders, make a list of who they are, and capture all the information that you have about them: what they care about and what they need from you – which is just as important as what you need from them.”
“The stakeholder canvas helps you bring clarity to stakeholder alignment and make prioritization more manageable,” Bruce concluded.
Be sure to catch the whole conversation with Bruce McCarthy to learn about all the other tools he applied to this challenge, including the DiSC® framework and the DACI and RACI decisionmaking tools.
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