EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 17Stakeholder Collaboration

People on feature teams dread the topic of stakeholders, especially product managers and product designers. They view these people as at worst dictatorial, or at best as obstacles to deal with.

This is yet another very clear example of the difference between feature teams and empowered product teams.

In companies with the feature team model, those features are usually coming from stakeholders, so the stakeholders view themselves as “the client,” and they view the product teams as “the hired IT resource.”

It's another way of saying that the purpose of a feature team is to “serve the business.”

Yet, in an empowered product team, the purpose of the product team is “to serve the customers in ways customers love, yet work for the business.”

So, in an empowered product team, while we still can't ignore the business, it is a very different relationship. Our job is to find a solution that works for customers and for the various parts of the business.

While it's true that the majority of the actual collaboration for a product team is happening between the product manager, designer, and engineers, a healthy relationship with stakeholders is based on true collaboration as well.

The product manager is not there to “gather requirements” from stakeholders, but the product manager is also not there to dictate solutions to stakeholders. Rather, the strong product manager understands that each stakeholder is responsible for some key aspect of the business, ...