Managing stakeholders
The customer isn’t always right
Startups thrive on being customer centric, but blindly chasing customer demands - especially from the highest bidder - can derail your product vision. As a Product Mmanager in a startup or innovation company looking to scale, you’re likely balancing feedback from customers, founders, investors, and your development team, while working under resource constraints.
A founder might say “Make it look like [insert trendy app here]!”. A customer says “We need XYZ feature now, or we’ll leave”. Your developers say “Let’s maintain design consistency”. So, how do you manage these competing demands while delivering a product that aligns with your vision, scales, and keeps your business strategy on track?
Getting started: Set the stage for success
Stakeholder misalignment can burn through your precious resources. Imagine spending weeks building a feature that a major customer demanded, only to realise it wasn’t technically feasible. Or perhaps worse, it wasn’t what your key investors expected.
Managing stakeholders isn’t about saying “yes” to everything. It’s about earning trust, aligning expectations, and focusing on what matters: building a product that solves problems for customers and propels your business forward.
Success in stakeholder management relies on:
Understanding stakeholder concerns and constraints.
Showing how your product roadmap addresses their needs.
Communicating transparently and frequently.
In an innovation environment, your stakeholders might include:
Founders and executives: Driving the company vision and funding.
Engineering teams: Bringing your ideas to life.
Sales and marketing: Bridging the product with the market.
Investors and advisors: Expecting results and growth.
Practical approaches for managing stakeholders
Engineering Teams: Build a Shared Vision
Developers are your biggest allies. They care about building great products but need clarity on the “why,” not just the “what.”
Focus on outcomes over features: “This capability helps us reduce onboarding time by 50%.”
Share customer stories or real-world use cases to connect the dots.
Keep communication two-way: Let engineers explain ideas back to ensure alignment.
Founders and Executives: Link Product to Business Outcomes
Startup founders often juggle investor expectations, strategy pivots, and scaling challenges.
Prepare concise “elevator pitches” for your roadmap and its value.
Show how product priorities drive growth, revenue, or market traction.
Be data-driven: Back up delays or changes with evidence, not opinions.
Sales and Marketing: Focus on Impact, Not Features
Sales teams live on the front lines and can feel immense pressure to close deals.
Explain how upcoming features solve customer pain points or give a competitive edge.
Be open to feedback but validate assumptions before shifting priorities.
Provide messaging to help marketing craft stories that resonate with customers.
Investors and Advisors: Show Progress and Learning
Investors want confidence that you are iterating effectively toward product-market fit.
Share key learnings from experiments and data, even when things don’t go as planned.
Be transparent about challenges but highlight how you’re solving them.
Position your product strategy as a way to de-risk investment while achieving growth.
Frameworks for managing stakeholders
Interest/Power vs Influence Mapping
Identify stakeholders based on:
Interest: How engaged they are with your product.
Power: Their ability to influence product decisions.
Influence: How connected they are across your startup.
Focus most of your efforts on high-interest, high-power stakeholders (e.g., founders, CTOs). Keep others informed but avoid design-by-committee.
Trust vs Agreement Mapping
Allies: Trust you and agree with your direction: Lean on them for support.
Associates: Agree but don’t fully trust: Build confidence by sharing updates and wins.
Opponents: Trust exists, but they disagree: Use that trust to explore their concerns.
Adversaries: Distrust and disagreement: Focus on finding common ground or mitigating risks.
Key tips for Product Managers
Start small and iterate: Avoid building features for individual stakeholders without validating their broader impact.
Say no with confidence: Back your decisions with data, customer insights, and a clear focus on long-term goals.
Avoid design-by-committee: Meet stakeholders one-on-one to understand their perspectives without groupthink dynamics.
Involve stakeholders early.:Use prototypes or MVPs to gather feedback before investing heavily in development.
Communicate relentlessly: Stakeholders are busy. Don’t assume they’ll understand the roadmap without regular updates.
Balancing customer input with corporate vision
Customer feedback is gold , but not every request deserves action. A sustainable product solves customer problems at scale, not just for your loudest customer.
As a Product Manager, your role is to filter inputs, prioritise the roadmap, and align stakeholders behind a shared product vision. Managing these relationships with transparency, empathy, and clarity will ensure your team builds products that truly matter.
