Product Chats Podcast Mastering Stakeholder Engagement for Product Success with Bruce McCarthy
Jan 10, 2025
In this discussion, Bruce McCarthy, a renowned product management expert and author of 'Aligned,' shares his insights on effective stakeholder management. He emphasizes the importance of building trust and rapport through transparency and vulnerability. Bruce introduces the concept of 'sharp skills' as critical for product managers and advocates for treating internal stakeholders as customers. He also offers the 'stakeholder canvas' tool to categorize influence and encourages co-creating strategies with key stakeholders for successful product alignment.
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People Skills Drive Product Success
- Product management success depends more on managing people and expectations than on specs or roadmaps.
- "Sharp skills" like rapport and stakeholder work separate successful PMs from the rest.
Relationship Won The Role
- Bruce lost a CTO-picked role to a colleague who wrote excellent specs but won another role thanks to rapport.
- The CTO picked Bruce because they had built trust by interacting over time.
Interview Stakeholders Like Customers
- Do stakeholder discovery interviews and ask about their job, success metrics, and challenges before pitching your plan.
- Listen, summarize, and connect your needs to their goals to build rapport and buy-in.
