Stakeholder Rights Management - How to Become a More Effective PM and Maintain Your Sanity

As a growth product manager, you often face handling a large number of stakeholder relationships.

Websites, onboarding flows, sales enablement, conversion optimisation. All interfaces that are, so to speak, on the outside of the company and therefore visible to everyone in the company. And the bigger the company, the more eyeballs are going to be on your team’s work.

So, if strongly held opinions and “great ideas” are coming at you from all directions, you should consider rethinking how you evaluate input and whose voices should be considered critical.

The first time I was in a situation of overwhelming attention to my work, a more senior colleague taught me this framework that I am now passing on to you.

Think of your work as a shared document. Which permissions should your colleagues have to your work?

The framework took me a while to implement for myself, but it truly changed my work life and lowered my stress level. Thank you, Stefan!

You will probably need to make your own list of people to fit your exact situation, but here’s how I would usually assign stakeholder rights to my work.

Admin Rights

At the highest and most influential level, only very few people should have admin rights to your team's work.

Admin rights mean that these people can actually dictate what your team works on and kill projects if they so please.

Stakeholders with admin rights usually include:

You - You lead the team, you set the agenda, you are responsible for the success of the work, and you should be able to set your team’s agenda. You can also end incomplete projects if you no longer believe in the work.

Your Designer and Tech Lead - As a PM and team lead, you are ultimately responsible for your team’s work, but you are nothing without your designer and tech lead. So, you should never attempt to dictate your team’s actions but instead work with the others in your trinity to make smart choices together.

Your Manager - Your manager has the power to overrule any of your decisions, they can add or remove members of your team and can ultimately dismantle your team and send you looking for new opportunities.

Now, you probably have a great relationship with your manager, but nevertheless, you should always work to maintain strong alignment. You want their support and recognition. They can make or break you.

Senior Leadership - Everyone has a boss and even though you might be perfectly aligned with your manager, you are not immune from having your work be dictated or at least influenced from higher places. Sometimes it’s the CEO’s new north star that will change your team’s course.

Other times it might be new plans and visions from your company's COO or a new top-level hire like a CRO with a fresh strategy for driving growth.

These people usually mean well and are merely trying to get several layers of the organisation to work together towards the new common goal. But in that process, they might be more hands-on than you expected.

So, make sure that you are aligned with senior leadership and take time to keep them informed and get their input.

Edit Rights

The next level has slightly more people. These are your editors. Your team members, competency leads from around the company, lawyers, and generally really smart people whose opinions are sometimes worth treating as direct edits to your work.

Editors might also sometimes be blocking your progress and be super annoying, but the sooner you identify those critical individuals, the quicker you can get the input to make the necessary adjustments.

Your Team - You and your team should be in perfect sync and your team should have edit rights to the team’s work. They might not all

have equal rights, especially if you have a larger team, but ideally, your team members are in a position to have a strong degree of autonomy in what they spend their time on.

Select Other Teams - Depending on your company's structure, you are likely to have dependencies across product teams. While other PMs might not have the rights to tell your team what to do, effectively your teams need to align on a number of decisions.

Competency Leads - As you are likely in a position of leadership without management, this means that all your team members have their own managers or what’s sometimes known as competency leads. These people can be hugely influential on your work. The head of design or head of engineering are people that you should be close to and get input from. Their job is to align all products across the company, and that most likely includes your team’s work as well.

Legal or Compliance - If you operate in any regulated industry such as fintech, medtech, or defence, your work is likely to be closely scrutinised by your legal or compliance departments. These people are working to protect the company, but also working towards the same commercial goals as you. They have great influence on your team’s work and I would recommend building a close relationship and getting input early in your design processes.

Comment Rights

Next up, there is a group of people who will occasionally make really good points, who will read or watch all your updates, and whose comments are worth considering and responding to.

This group of stakeholders might not have actual power over you or your team’s work, but can be invaluable to your success.

Your Customers - Your customers will have lots of good comments that are worth listening to. Take those into account when prioritising your work and when you and the team are identifying problems and solutions for your product. But remember that customer comments are one person’s one-sided opinion, so remember not to treat comments as edits. It’s up to you to take what you should from the customers’ comments and turn them into edits.

Smart and Well-Formulated Colleagues - Your company is full of people with well-meaning and sometimes useful input. Some of those people should have comment rights, but not everyone. Look for those individuals whose comments really resonate with you, and engage with them. Engagement naturally encourages those people to give more in the future.

CS and RevOps - If you work with onboarding, sales-enablement, or other related fields, try to build strong relationships with the human counterparts to your product. Your common success will depend on your collaboration. And if you do not acknowledge their comments, you risk going down a path of misalignment, infighting, and blame. Keep your sales and CS colleagues well-informed and take time to listen and respond to their comments.

Viewing Rights

Last but not least, are the often large group of coworkers and perhaps customer who get "view rights". Most will probably never voice their opinions, but will just carry on with their lives. But some might and here's how we can handle those situations.

It's great to see so much interest in our work, even from those who might not be directly involved with our team. This shows a healthy and engaged workplace. However, with the volume of opinions we might encounter, it's important for us to focus primarily on feedback that directly impacts our projects and comes from knowledgeable sources.

This doesn't mean we ignore other inputs. Rather, we prioritize them based on their relevance and the expertise behind them. It’s about managing our time efficiently while remaining open to all perspectives.

If you receive feedback that doesn't align closely with our current objectives or from those who might not have full context, it's okay to acknowledge it politely but not to delve too deeply into it. We want to ensure that we're focusing our efforts where they're most needed.

Always remember, good ideas can come from anywhere, and everyone's perspective is valuable in its own way. We should be respectful and considerate when interacting with others, regardless of their role or familiarity with our work.

To keep everyone updated and involved, we'll continue providing regular updates about our team’s progress and decisions. This way, everyone stays informed, and it helps guide conversations about our work.

The best thing you can do for everyone whom you have assigned “view” rights to, is to be transparent about what your team is working on, your prioritisation, and why you made the choices you did.

Regular Loom videos or written updates will likely satisfy much of your curious colleagues. And while you might not think you have time to do that work just to keep coworkers informed, you should instead see your proactive updates as a way for you to guide the narrative around your team.

Conclusion

By setting boundaries and identifying which of your stakeholders should get which permissions to your team’s work, you get better at spending the right amount of effort on the right people.

And by proactively seeking out the input from key stakeholders, you naturally encounter fewer obstacles and blockers. Then, you keep progressing at a predictable speed and are less likely to become overwhelmed or stressed.

This framework is just for you and it's not something you want to put on your team’s Notion page. It’s for you to think about all your stakeholders and colleagues and mentally assign them the appropriate set of permissions.

Good luck, and let me know if the stakeholder rights management framework worked for you.