Hello INNOVATEwest Community,
Building highly-technical products often requires expert stakeholders; these individuals have a lot of knowledge, but it’s your job to bring everyone to the table. This is something Batya Fellman, Senior Staff Technical Program Manager at Rivian, learned through her career building global-scale tech products. Speaking with INNOVATEwest, Batya shared her approach to building “soft power” in stakeholder management.
Key takeaways:
- You’ll often work with two types of stakeholders: experts contributing to the product and management wanting delivery timelines.
- Cultivating soft power starts with building some expertise yourself, collaboratively setting up milestones, making life easy for stakeholders, and continually inhabiting the voice of the customer.
- Emotions can run high in complex projects. The best way to diffuse tension is to assume everyone started with best intent—then troubleshoot problems, not people.
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The path to building a great product runs through stakeholders, many of whom have a lot of things tugging at their time.
The art of managing stakeholders is about making it easy for them to contribute to the project in a way you need them to. This is something Batya Fellman, Senior Staff Technical Program Manager at Rivian, picked up throughout her career building global-scale software and hardware products .
Speaking with INNOVATEwest, Batya shared her stakeholder management approach that any innovator can copy.
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You have to manage two types of stakeholders
The first thing to understand about stakeholder management is you aren’t just working with one type of person.
First, you’re working with subject matter experts who can contribute to a certain piece of the project. The core goal with these individuals is to get them to not just deliver their own insight, but collaborate across each other as necessary.
“Oftentimes, what you need to do is figure out ‘How do we get these technical experts to actually talk to each other so that we’re looking at the larger picture?’” said Batya.
Second, you’re working with management and leadership; your goal is setting realistic expectations for delivery.
“Everyone just wants to know ‘When is this thing going to be working?’” said Batya. “But obviously there’s lots of stages to what it means to be working and proof of concepts, and we have to be able to take risks.”
Within this dichotomy, you sit in the middle as the voice of the customer. And it’s also worth noting that you don’t really “manage” your stakeholders. Instead, you balance everyone’s needs in the interim so the project gets what it needs in the end.
“It comes down to soft power,” said Batya. “You’re dealing with experts. You’re not their bosses. A lot of it is building trust.”
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Build soft power by building trust
Here’s Batya’s approach to building trust with stakeholders so that each comes to the table.
1. Do your homework
The first thing to do, said Batya, is build an understanding of each expert’s area—this is so you inhabit the voice of the customer within an expert’s context, making conversations far more fruitful.
“A lot of it is… building enough of an understanding of each of their different areas,” said Bayta. “Then you’re not just taking things at face value, but you can push on things in the right way and ask questions.”
2. Set up milestones to break down work
A final outcome—for instance, a Rivian vehicle—will have dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller milestones that are essential to the finished product. Your job in stakeholder management is to break down these milestones in a way that makes sense for your experts and for management demanding timelines. But it’s imperative you don’t try to do this alone.
“Work with people to develop milestones,” said Batya. “…when you get alignment on those milestones, it allows people to run more quickly.”
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3. Make life easy for stakeholders
Many technical experts love what they do, want to deep-dive, and don’t want to deal with corporate bureaucracy. If you can make life easier for stakeholders by handling as much administration and bureaucracy as possible, you not only make them more likely to participate but also free up more time in their schedules to do the technical work you need them to do.
“I’ve seen people be very grateful for that,” said Batya. “…People will also be volunteering and coming back with information like ‘hey, I did this but I’m dependent on this other person,’ which can help you go through your cycle of work as well.”
4. Keep your customer hat on throughout the whole process
Being the voice of the customer doesn’t end when the project gets built or every expert has contributed their piece; it needs to continue through testing and validation. When that happens, you ensure you’re not only building a more scalable product but one that will actually deliver benefits to customers.
“I’m going to put my customer hat on and I’m going to break this and I’m going to come back,” said Batya.
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Manage from best intent
In any project, but particularly those with multiple highly-skilled stakeholders, emotions can take hold. If this happens to you, Batya’s advice is to realize your job is to cool the situation down.
One of the best ways she’s learned to diffuse tension is to begin from the assumption that everyone wants to deliver an awesome product—this not only avoids accusations and blame, but also redirects energy to the goal outcome rather than the emotions of the moment. From there, you can avoid a toxic blame culture by troubleshooting problems rather than people.
“If you work on the assumption that everyone you’re working with wants to be able to put out an awesome product and wants to do the best, then everything else follows,” said Batya.
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