Measuring Success Through Stakeholder Management
Notes from what I presented on 26 May 2022 at the UXPA-NJ monthly meetup.
I also don’t have a presentation, just gonna talk briefly so I don’t go over time as I am verbose.
Dee said “Evangelize.” I like that. I sent a guy out for months to sell the UX team and the concept of user-centered design at one org, and have assisted with similar pushes at others since then.
I’ve acutally done a lot of the stuff Dee and Janine mentioned; inviting the product team to research — and I like ethnography so that’s even harder — doing workshops to onboard with the concept of UX and the product concept etc. I even have articles on these, so just ask for links or go look for it and I’ll happily share the full details of my POV. But now ;et me be the cynical one, but Dee knows that as do all my clients so that’s what you get with me!
I’ve been doing this work since the mid-1990s, worked in a big multinational telecom for 9 years, and I’ve had some clients for over a decade.
But overall, for the early part of my career and for the last 15 years, I’ve worked at or with agencies, or been a consultant. I have seen the inner workings of over 100 organizations, from startup to Fortune 50, on probably a couple thousand projects.
As a True Believer in the value of UX — of being a user advocate, and doing our work for the betterment of the user’s lives if not mankind generally — I tend to say most stakeholder interactions in the broadest sense are failures. Largely because UX is not integrated in many orgs, and Business (and often dev for similar reasons) over-rides good design, sustainable practices, and even too often ethical decisionmaking.
So my POV is mostly going to be the one for those put-upon lonely UXers here trying to start working with these modern business problems. Two big issues that help at least frame it for me are Speed and Consensus.
Speed — is both a modern process problem (Bad Agile and so on) and a market value problem. Only quarterly reporting periods matter, and more than profit or loss, only market cap matters. So all decisions are short term.
Consensus — is how all decisions in corporations are made. This means that the primary job of most managers is pleasing their boss. And so on up to the CEO who wants to please the shareholders. Only. Users? Quality? Meh.
This other part of Consensus Business means no one wants to make decisions, but they try to gain consensus — even if by bullying. UXers with heuristics and data to back it don’t agree. It’s up to Stakeholders to make DECISIONS even if they over-ride us, and they hate that. We have to get used to all this being informed, discussed, then decisions. Insisting on consensus paralyzes teams or causes people to leave the org.
A GOOD product manager is managing to the success of the product, over the org per se, or the project itself. They make decisions when consensus comes up, for the betterment of the product, and tend to be on the UX side as we’re also in favor of sustainable success, not trends and tricks.
The general decline of Project management generally is one of the biggest problems in the current state of stakeholder management.
If there’s any real tips and tricks I have, it’s to:
Find out who is the product manager, even if that’s not their official title. Try to make them your friend whatever it takes.
Find the organization principles and goals. Design to them. Bring them up a lot.
Find, or define yourself, the project and product goals. Get everyone to agree, and design to them. Throw them back at the team’s faces as needed.
All these don’t always work in the sense of you win all design arguments, but they give you some success, AND they give you an excuse that people understand more — as few understand we’re about data, science, proof instead of gut instinct and opinion — for why you stick to your guns and won’t negotiate.
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Further discussions on (closed) forums and direct messages happened by pure chance to occur just hours after the presentation, so with permission an edited version of that conversation also:
As a leader I have to go out of my way to get real information. I can't simply "demand" it be given to me "straight". I know for a fact when I say, "I want you guys to tell me everything and be honest," my team rolls their eyes and internally says, "yeah, right." It takes a significant amount of trust building between me and my team to enable them to be open and take those risks.
Most of the information I get is self discovered by me "walking around" and asking questions right out of all the leadership books.
You don't ask simple yes/no, good/bad questions because you know the answer already:
How's it going? (Good)
You got enough resources? (Yes)
Anything I can do to help? (No, all fine)
Instead: Open ended "just curious" questions work better:
What are you working on now? It looks really cool. I'm not versed in this area so can you explain it to me in detail? Do you have a demo I can see? As they show off impressing you, you can learn a ton about what's going on. [This is also in my ad-hoc ethnography article, and when I mentioned sneaking in research with a tag-along site visit, I have done that a lot. Get a tour of the facility, of the process, etc. barely ask a question and their natural responses and demeanor tell a LOT]
You interact with Group XYZ? What was the last project you worked on? What did they provide for you? Did you need any thing else they were not able to provide? As they compliment the other group to avoid political drama they will often backhand tell you what was missing or went wrong. [Both of these can also come up in workshopping if there is a time limit, it is very project-specific or you can only get people for formal events, cannot stop by or chat casually with them individually.]
I should add those questions should be asked as a fan not a detective. Everyone loves fans and will get talking endlessly. That’s the objective. Get them talking and then guide the conversation. No one likes a detective and will start to calm up or outright deceive.
A causal fan. A super fan comes across false and suspicious.
A guide to success is their response length far exceeds your question length. Turning off information is easy. Too much is better than too little. Use all the normal user research moderator tricks, like not interrupting; do not be afraid of empty space as they will fill it.